CEO Carolyn Hall recently represented Mulloon Institute and Australia at Berlin’s Partners for Change – SOILutions for a Food Secure, Resilient, and Sustainable Future conference in May. Carolyn shares a series of blog posts reflecting on the aims, challenges, impacts and themes that ran throughout the conference.
Picture this: “You have exactly five minutes to summarise 90 minutes of expert discussion about soil health and the Rio Conventions to 150 global delegates in Berlin”. The pressure was intense, but what emerged revealed critical truths about our planet’s future.
The sobering reality: When asked how well soil health was incorporated into 2024’s COPs, experts agreed – only slightly. The substance that produces 95% of our food and stores more carbon than the atmosphere barely gets mentioned at our most important environmental summits.
The breakthrough insight: Land restoration isn’t one solution among many – it’s THE key solution for all three Rio Convention challenges:
One integrated challenge, one integrated answer: healthy soil.
The game-changer: We need coordination that starts from the bottom up. Farmer’s voices and women’s stories must be central to planning. National Focal Points need better support to include local communities in global conversations.
The path forward requires three strategies:
The five-minute truth: We have the science, economics, and examples. What we need is political will to put soil health at the centre of our response to climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation.
The health of our planet depends on the health of the ground beneath our feet. It’s time our policies and markets reflected that reality.
