Applying the Meta Soil Model: The Connections Between Soil Security and Water Security in a Permanent Protection Area in Brazil.

The concept of soil security has been developed to protect and sustain valuable soil resources by reframing the importance of soil in context of solving wicked global environmental issues. Soil security denotes freedom from risks of losing a specific or a group of soil functions. However, it is not possible to secure the soil functions if we do not identify them appropriately in quantitative and even qualitative ways and involve stakeholders, decision-makers and scientists/experts in the process. Here, Meta Soil Modeling (MSM) theory was used to fill the gap. The MSM is an integrative, multi-model framework to assess soil security within the context of regional and global human-environmental interactions. This integral inspired MSM framework facilitates not only soil, soil-ecosystem and soil-human system syntheses, but also allows quantifying integration trajectories that connect the different dimensions of soil security. We applied the MSM in a case study connecting soil and water security in the Permanent Protection Area (PPA) of Sana-Macae/RJ, Brazil. We explored the soil functions ‘provision of clean water and its storage’, as well as ‘soils acting as filter minimizing the contamination of water ways’.  In this region the soil security has been at risk due to soil mismanagement and land use incongruent to the underlying soils, which has caused soil compaction and water erosion. Despite the availability of soil maps and scientific understanding of the processes of soil erosion and degradation soil and water security was not interlinked in the PPA. The MSM further revealed that the main cause of soil insecurity was the disconnection between extension public agency, politicians and land owners, their values and beliefs relative to the scientific understanding of soils and water cycling in the PPA. The results emphasize that soil-watersecurity has more probability to be achieved when extension, politicians,land owners and scientists/experts work together towards solve the  problem.