Evangelista, Sandra J., Field, Damien J., McBratney, Alex B., Minasny, Budiman, Ng, Wartini, Padarian, José, Román Dobarco, Mercedes, and Wadoux, Alexandre M.J.-C. (2023) A proposal for the assessment of soil security: Soil functions, soil services and threats to soil. Soil Security, 10. 100086.

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Abstract

Human societies face six existential challenges to their sustainable development. These challenges have been previously addressed by a myriad of concepts such as soil conservation, soil quality, and soil health. Yet, of these, only soil security attempts to integrate the six existential challenges concurrently through the five biophysical and socio-economic dimensions of capacity, condition, capital, connectivity and codification. In this paper, we highlight past and existing concepts, and make a proposal for a provisional assessment of soil security. The proposal addresses three roles of soil: soil functions, soil services and threats to soil. For each identified role, we indicate a potential, but not exhaustive, list of indicators that characterise the five dimensions of soil security. We also raise issues of quantification and combination of indicators briefly. We found that capacity and condition are theoretically easier to measure and quantify than connectivity and codification. The dimension capital might be conveniently assessed using indicators that relate to the economic value of soils. The next step is to test this proposal for which we make recommendations on potential study cases and examples. We conclude that the five dimensions of soil security can potentially be assessed quantitatively and comprehensively using indicators that characterise each role, but also found that there is need for further work to devise an operational measurement methodology to estimate connectivity of people to soil.

Item ID:	94217
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2667-0062
Copyright Information:	© 2023 Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Funders:	Australian Research Council (ARC)
Projects and Grants:	ARC FL210100054
Date Deposited:	21 Oct 2026 06:24
FoR Codes:	41 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES > 4106 Soil sciences > 410699 Soil sciences not elsewhere classified @ 100%
SEO Codes:	18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1806 Terrestrial systems and management > 180605 Soils @ 100%
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