A new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) finds that more than half of regional assessments rate soil stewardship efforts as poor or very poor.
The study titled “Status of the World’s Soil Resources 2026: A Global Call to Action to Restore and Sustain the World’s Soils” warned that current measures are insufficient to halt—and in many places reverse—the ongoing degradation of the world’s soils.
The study identifies soil erosion as the most severe and interconnected threat to soils globally, stripping topsoil, reducing rooting depth, depleting nutrients and carbon, limiting water infiltration and increasing risks of both floods and droughts.
RELATED POSTS
The report also points to worsening soil biodiversity, nutrient mismanagement, salinization and pollution, as well as urban expansion and soil sealing, as major pressures undermining soil functions and agricultural productivity. In many landscapes, several of these threats are occurring simultaneously, making restoration more difficult.
The scale of the implementation gap is particularly stark. About 52 percent of regional and subregional assessments report low or very low adoption of sustainable soil management practices, while 58 percent report deteriorating trends since 2015.
The report attributes slow uptake partly to high upfront costs, limited access to finance and technical support, inadequate soil information, weak extension services, fragmented governance and insufficient incentives.
FAO calls on governments, farmers, researchers, businesses and civil society to treat healthy soils as strategic assets underpinning food and water security, climate resilience, biodiversity and livelihoods.
It urges stronger soil governance, expanded capacity building, improved monitoring, better-targeted incentives and more inclusive decision-making to close the widening gap between what is known about sustainable soil management and what is being implemented on the ground.
