Rights-of-Soil

Excerpt

Soil is a finite and fragile resource. It is unequally distributed geographically and is prone to degradation and depletion because of the growing pressure to produce goods and ecosystem services for the rapidly increasing and progressively affluent human population. The global per capita arable land area was 0.37 ha (0.91 ac) in 1961 and is projected to be 0.17 ha (0.42 ac; and less than 0.14 ha [0.35 ac] in developing countries) by 2050 (Lal 2016). Productivity of the shrinking resource base is also being jeopardized by the ever increasing risks of soil degradation, already affecting 23% of the planet's land area (Bai et al. 2008), and the changing and uncertain climate. The anthropogenic climate change (ACC) has already caused global warming by 1°C (1.8°F) until 2017, and the global temperature is rising at the rate of 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade (Ngo et al. 2019). As much as 75% of the Earth's land surface is already altered by humans, and 85% of the wetlands are lost (Ngo et al. 2019). Prime agricultural land is being encroached upon by urbanization, which has doubled between 1992 and 2018. Arable land area is also shrinking because of infrastructure development, especially in developing countries.