Headline: Soils and the Sustainable Development Goals: Conference in Tutzing Highlights the Need for Action

This September the international community will meet in New York to develop a new set of goals – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – to replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expire this year. With long-term trends such as population growth and increasing demand for water, energy and food impinging on sustainable development, the need to address the degradation of soils is clear. At the conference “Soils, food security, and sustainable land management for sustainable development post-2015”, members of the public and other stakeholders from academia, local and national government, NGOs, and the arts discussed options for integrating soils and land into the post-2015 sustainable development agenda. The conference, which took place in Tutzing from 11 to 13 February, was organised by the Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, the Biovision Foundation for Ecological Development, the Millennium Institute, the German Federal Environmental Agency and the IASS.

“The current landscape of sustainability governance is fragmented and does not address soil and land issues in a coherent manner. Important processes are converging in 2015, including the Climate Conference in Paris, the UN International Year of Soils, and the Sustainable Development Goals defining the Post-2015 development agenda,” stated IASS Secretary General Alexander Müller. The current draft of the SDGs, produced after formal discussions and U.N. Working Group meetings, includes 17 goals and 169 targets, which range from ending hunger to combating climate change and conserving oceans. Goal 15 is directly related to protecting, restoring and promoting the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems and halting and reversing land degradation. Goal 2 calls for the achievement of food security and the promotion of sustainable agriculture. Goal 17 focuses on strengthening the means of implementation and revitalising global partnerships for sustainable development.

The conference addressed possible means of implementation for the SDGs, including monitoring, accountability, and reporting of the sustainable use of soils and land management. Michael Brander (Biovision) provided an overview of the Post-2015 Development Agenda process, outlining the current status, next steps and expectations in terms of stakeholder involvement, indicator discussions and means of implementation. Ivonne Lobos Alva (IASS) presented an assessment of how land and soils have been addressed in the post-2015 sustainable development agenda negotiations to date. “While soils are addressed directly in some of the goals, they are crucial for the achievement of most of them,” she claimed. Lobos Alva highlighted the trade-offs and potentially conflicting demands observed in the overarching analysis of the SDG agenda. For instance, goal 15 calls for a halt to land degradation and deforestation, while goal 2 aims to ensure sufficient food for all and a doubling of the agricultural productivity of small-scale food producers. Increases in production could lead to the intensification of agricultural production or the further expansion of the agricultural frontier into forest areas. Lobos Alva cited several of these examples and called for an “integrated approach” to the implementation of the SDGs.

The discussion highlighted necessary actions as well as open questions in the ongoing process. These will serve as talking points at the Global Soil Week, which the IASS will host from 19 to 23 April in Berlin:

• Multi-stakeholder mechanisms and processes on soils, food security, and sustainable land management are needed at all levels to advance sustainable development post-2015. How can this be achieved given the diversity of power structures, involvement and interests? How can we ensure that the public is also involved?
• New ways for communicating soils and their services are needed to mobilise broader public participation. How can the issues be framed and communicated despite their inherent complexity? How can we avoid that people feel alienated and that they do not want to get engaged in addressing soil-related issues because “they are too complex”?
• What is the responsibility of countries like Germany to contribute to the SDG agenda and its national implementation?
• There is a need to define indicators for soils in the SDGs. Although the set of indicators agreed upon by the secretariats of the three Rio Conventions – namely, land-use cover, land productivity and soil organic carbon – are useful, land degradation is a qualitative assessment rather than a quantitative measurement. How can we get this right?
• How can we share the costs of the means of implementation and how can we ensure that the benefits reach a wider set of stakeholders?

Photo: © NASA/Bill Ingalls

17.02.2015