Soils are hot. The planet is warming fast, and soils absorb, process and store a large share of excess heat, with real consequences for the life they sustain and the ecosystem services they provide.
Healthy soils are the basis of nutritious and abundant food, they hold water through droughts, provide stability through floods, they filter groundwater, and support the majority of global species biodiversity. It is all the more troubling, then, that soil threats such as compaction, pollution, erosion and soil sealing are rapidly reducing soil’s capacity to perform its myriad functions. From a climate action perspective, two critical climate functions are most prominent:
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Thermal buffering. When soils are dry and barren, solar energy is converted into heat that warms the soil and the air directly above it (‘sensible heat’). When soils are healthy, moist and vegetated, incoming solar energy is used to evaporate water and fuel plant transpiration (‘latent heat’). By converting sensible heat into latent heat, land surfaces stay cooler and more humid, preventing temperature spikes.
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Water retention. Soil holds water, releasing it slowly through dry spells and soaking it up during heavy rain. In a climate of increasing weather extremes, that buffering is among the most valuable services soils provide. This makes securing small water cycles (i.e. the local movement of water between soil, plants and atmosphere) imperative.
Against this background, it is striking how legal systems tend to engage with soil mainly at the property scale and treat it as a dispensable commodity, whereas soil science tells us that soils are highly spatially interconnected and constitute an essentially non-renewable resource. The gap between these worlds highlights the strong need for improved soil literacy.
Moreover, existing laws and policies affecting soil management are generally fragmented across agricultural, environmental, water, and waste management laws, often with competing policy objectives (e.g. preservation versus production). Consequently, there is often no single government agency responsible for regulating soil, despite the strong need for more coherent policy approaches towards protecting and preserving soil.
On the international stage, attempts to build cross-border legal protection for soil have traditionally been resisted on the grounds that soils are deemed to be a national affair, best governed locally. Yet, not only are biological, physical, and chemical components of soil health connected across borders, but activities in one country may also leave a negative footprint on soils elsewhere. Think for instance of how emissions in industrialised countries cause melting of the permafrost in the Arctic, leading to the release of greenhouse gases formerly stored in soils in that region and thereby further exacerbating climate change.
Admittedly, some progress has been made in recent years. For instance, the UNFCCC COP28 of 2023 was notable for including ‘soil health’ in its UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems and Climate Action. Under its goals, the document calls for actions that maximise the climate benefits of agriculture and food systems by ‘enhancing soil health, and biodiversity’. Even so, soils remain a marginal presence in international climate law processes, with attention largely confined to soil’s potential to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Other recent regulatory efforts on soil have often settled on that same function. In Australia, for instance, there is the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme (‘ACCUs’), under which landholders can earn credits for, among other methods, adopting new practices that store carbon in agricultural soils. Similarly, the EU’s new Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) framework serves to establish a voluntary EU-wide certification system that can quantify, monitor, and verify carbon removals and soil emission reductions in agriculture and forestry.
The appeal of soils as carbon sinks is understandable, but it is important to note that carbon stored in soil is highly volatile and reversible by nature. A change in management, excessively dry weather conditions, or a shift in land use can easily return it to the atmosphere. That makes it difficult, if not impossible, to set effective monitoring, accountability and liability mechanisms for carbon farming schemes for soils. This is particularly problematic in light of the myriad controversies that already surround carbon credit schemes, having been described as ‘hot air’ that severely exaggerates real-world climate offsets.
Moreover, as Dr Julien Etienne argues elsewhere in this blog series, the climate crisis is one of accumulated stocks of greenhouse gases, and treating soil sinks as an offset for continued flows risks postponing much-needed action in the domain of emission reductions.
Perhaps most importantly, however, this emphasis on soil carbon sequestration obscures the greater potential of soil. The concept of ‘soil security’ provides a helpful lens here, focused on the maintenance and improvement of global soil resources to produce food, fibre, and freshwater, combat climate change, and protect biodiversity. Defining, measuring, monitoring and ultimately regulating soil security remains, however, a complex task because soil is a living, not static, system. A multidisciplinary framework on soil security has been developed and is further being refined to address some of the challenges soil regulation presents, including capturing soil’s physical, chemical and biological properties, and soil functions, services and threats.
The concept of soil security gained further traction through Resolution 8.007 adopted at the 2025 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress session in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. This provides the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law’s Specialist Group on Soil & Sustainable Agriculture Law, among others, with a strong mandate to develop concepts and parameters for an international convention or a global legal instrument on soil security.
It is encouraging to see a recent increase in legislative developments and regulatory interventions that reflect, to greater or lesser degree, the need to embrace soil’s potential beyond ‘mere’ carbon sinks.
In November 2025, for example, the Pan-African Parliament adopted a Model Law on Sustainable Soil Management in Africa, the first of its kind on the continent. As a template for national legislation, it expressly recognises soil's role in climate mitigation and adaptation in its Article 11:
“(3) The competent authority shall take measures to protect, maintain, and enhance soil services in climate adaptation, including through the protection of biodiversity, the improvement of water retention, and the regulation of temperature, to strengthen ecosystem resilience under climate variability.”
Depending on the eventual take-up by African States, this Model Law could pave the way for enhanced legislative action to preserve and promote soil’s capacity to address climate change.
The new EU Soil Monitoring & Resilience Directive, adopted late 2025, presents another example. Against the backdrop of an estimated 60-70% of soils across the EU being in a degraded state, this new law establishes a common framework for assessing soil health, identifying and managing contaminated sites, and supporting sustainable land management through training activities and capacity building for soil managers. However, in the face of intensive pushback and lobbying from certain agricultural and producer groups, the law was regrettably watered down significantly and stripped of binding obligation to restore unhealthy soils, at a time where climate crisis-driven heat is already ‘sucking soils dry’ across the Union.
India’s Soil Health Card is another initiative worthy of mention. Launched nationally in 2015, its objective is to provide farmers with a printed report card every three years indicating the status of their soil in terms of 12 soil parameters. Additionally, it suggests corrective measures for cropping deficiencies through nutrient management practices. Noteworthy too is that in 2016, Sikkim, a state in northeast India, became the world’s first fully organic state, with a ban on synthetic chemical fertilisers and pesticides. All 76,000 hectares of its farmland are now certified organic. This historic achievement followed considered, gradual and proportionate law reform flowing from a state political resolution adopted in 2003.
One thing these various regulatory initiatives have in common is a strong focus on enhancing transparency and monitoring in relation to the status of (privately owned) soils. While monitoring soil quality often remains costly and complex, it can be an important tool for owners, property valuers, financiers and insurers to appropriately appraise and value the land. Moreover, it can enable the (private and/or public) rewarding of plural value creation, connecting both private goods (e.g. agricultural productivity) and public goods (e.g. water retention).
In the fight against climate change, soil must be championed as a living system that can help temper local climate conditions and absorb weather shocks. Soils as carbon sinks are great where they work but should never be a licence to keep emitting. To recognise and respond to the scale and cross-border nature of soil degradation, and to best leverage the potential of soil as an indispensable climate ally, express soil policies and laws must urgently be developed and promoted at local, national, regional and international levels.
Want to learn more? Here are some resources for listening, watching or researching, or feel free to reach out to the authors to start a conversation about soils.
You can email Dr Edwin Alblas at edwin.alblas@wur.nl and Freya Mulvey at freya@groundedlawandadvice.com.