A Framework to Link Soil Security with Sustainable Land Management Practices and Land Evaluation.

Soil security is concerned “with the maintenance and improvement of the world’s soil resource to produce food, fibre and freshwater, contribute to energy and climate sustainability, and maintain biodiversity and the overall protection of the ecosystem” (McBratney et al 2014). One advantage of soil security is that it emphasises the value of soils to society, as does the “soil capital” concept (Dominati et al. 2010), which is a change from the traditional approach of many soil evaluation systems that emphasised the limitations or land degradation aspects of soils. The emphasis on land degradation and soil limitations has potentially had a negative impact for positive consideration of soils in policy development. While the links of soil security to soil evaluation and assessment systems/schemes have been discussed (McBratney et al. 2014), there is scope to expand on how soil security links to soil evaluation systems in more detail, and how specific sustainable land management practices contribute to soil security. Furthermore, many of the soil evaluation schemes have valuable data and information on soil capability and soil condition. We suggest that soil security can provide a framework to integrate the diverse range of available soil evaluation schemes. A matrix based on the six soil functions (food security, water security, energy security, climate change abatement, human health, biodiversity protection) and the dimensions of soil security (capability, condition, capital, connectivity, codification) is proposed as a framework to define the applicability of soil and land evaluation systems. Several land and soil evaluation systems and recommended sets of sustainable land management practices (Liniger et al. 2011; Office of Environment and Heritage 2012; Palm et al. 2007 and Winterbottom et al 2013) are used to demonstrate the proposed framework. The framework identifies the dimensions of soil security that are encompassed by the different schemes. It also provides a conduit to link particular dimensions of soil security to specific land management practices, and can account for the effect of scale on the management of soil security.