Soil-Value: Valuing and enhancing soil infrastructure to improve societal sustainability and resilience

Soils are a life support system for global society and our planet. Soils directly provide the vast majority of our food; they are the largest store of carbon in the earth system; and they regulate water quality and quantity reducing the risk of floods, droughts and pollution. In this way, soils provide a natural form of infrastructure that is critical to supporting both rural and urban communities and economies. Despite the criticality of this infrastructure, we do not understand:

- the current delivery of services in terms of food production, water flow and quality regulation and carbon storage - from which soils do these services derive and what value do they have for rural/urban communities?

- how the decisions we make regarding land drainage, tillage, crop choice, livestocking, tree planting, deforestation, and urban development influence the capability of the soil to provide its' multiple services, or how these decisions may interact.

- how resilient our soil infrastructure will be to a changing climate and the increasing pressures to produce more food from less land that our global society faces in trying to feed a population of 9 billion by 2050, and ongoing urbanisation.

This lack of understanding stems from a lack of integration across traditionally separate scientific fields that relate to soil infrastructure. Soil functioning is the product of hydrological, physical (soil erosion and weathering), biological and chemical processes, and as such it requires knowledge to be combined across these fields.

This fellowship will draw together these disciplines to create a new computer model that will improve our understanding of soil infrastructures, their value to society and their resilience. This model will be used to explore how future scenarios will influence the provision of food-water-carbon services to our societies. Uncertainty and risk analyses will be performed to provide a coherent robust evidence base for decision-making. This will allow us to find ways to enhance our soils to provide more benefits for our societies, improving sustainability and well-being.

This fellowship aims to:
a. Assess the value of soils as a natural infrastructure that protects and enhances both rural and urban areas through food production, water regulation and carbon storage.
b. Estimate the resilience of soil infrastructure to climate change and changing land-use pressures and explore the potential for managing soil infrastructures to mitigate risks and enhance their value and resilience.
c. Transform the perceived value of soil infrastructure in communities and businesses, and enhance decision-making capabilities across sectors to help create sustainable resilient societies.

The outputs of this fellowship will include:
- Scientific insights into soil functioning, sustainability and resilience.
- The first valuations of soil as an infrastructure, it's capacity for enhancement, and it's vulnerability to a changing climate and increasing land use pressures.
- Estimates of the uncertainties surrounding these estimations, and how this influences to the risk to delivery of food, water and carbon services.
- Quantitative predictive modelling frameworks that can support sustainable, resilient decision making across food, water and environment sectors.
- Deepened engagement between scientists, businesses, policy makers, and NGOs.

This fellowship will have far-reaching economic and societal impacts through providing benefits to the following groups:

Businesses: Understanding the consequences of soil infrastructure management choices and improving soil infrastructure resilience of a must-have for sustainable business. The quantitative tools created within this fellowship will provide a significant step forward in decision-making capabilities within the private sector. By accounting for system interactions and feedbacks, this holistic modelling framework will allow companies to form robust business cases for investing in soil infrastructures that go far beyond current capabilities, which rely on static natural capital mapping.

Many businesses directly rely on soil infrastructures. The primary sectors of agriculture and forestry rely on soil infrastructures to support plant growth and livestock production, and it follows that manufacturers and retailers that use these raw materials are also dependent on soil. Hence, all these business sectors either directly influence soil infrastructure through management of soil in agriculture or have indirect influences through their supply chains. Other industries that also influence and benefit from soil infrastructures include the waste water sector and insurance companies that hedge the risks associated with floods and crop failures. This research will have impact on emerging industries such as natural infrastructure investment, precision agriculture and bio-fuels/crops/materials.

Policy Makers: This fellowship will deliver systemic understanding and quantitative frameworks that assess how soil and land management decisions influence the capacity of soils to deliver critical food-water-carbon services, and how these change under increasing societal demands and climate change. This is a critical need for policy makers across departments. UK policy makers from DECC, DEFRA, EA and FSA have identified complexity in decision making across the energy-food-environment nexus as a major challenge, as demonstrated by their support of a recent ESRC call focused on this topic. The importance of new joined-up thinking in managing our environment is also prominent internationally, as demonstrated in the European Environment Agency's State of the Environment Report 2015, which calls for greater systemic understanding and integration across environment and climate policies.

The models will provide insights that specifically relate to the following policies:

- EU Water Framework Directive: model results will estimate how long measures put in place as a consequence of this policy will take to reduce nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment fluxes to waterways under future scenarios of climate and land use pressures.
- Climate Change Act and the Low Carbon Transition Plan: in estimating carbon storage, the modelling framework will deliver information on how management options help meet carbon commitments.
- Common Agricultural Policy: the model will provide estimates of food, water and carbon benefits resulting from varying options for agricultural land management, which could inform future greening funding through CAP.

Wider public: Increased sustainability, realised through improved soil infrastructure decision-making, translates as health and quality of life benefits for societies in the UK. By transferring knowledge with multinational businesses, these benefits are also transmitted internationally. A major goal of this work is to raise awareness of soil as a critical life support infrastructure that protects and serves societies, and connects across rural and urban communities. A raised awareness of soil and its importance in securing the future of our society and our planet can help motivate bottom-up changes towards sustainable lifestyles. Partnership with the Sustainable Food Trust offers one mechanism for raising soil sustainability awareness, as they engage with farmers, citizens, industry and policy makers.