Across the globe, soils have been degraded through unsustainable agricultural practices. New research is showing how effective land restoration can sequester carbon dioxide and slow climate change.

Resilience.org reports on how work underway by several scientists is investigating how land restoration programs in places like the former North American prairie, the North China Plain and the dry interior of Australia might help put carbon back into the soil.

“Regenerative agricultural practices can turn back the carbon clock, reducing atmospheric CO2 while also boosting soil productivity and increasing resilience to floods and drought,” says the article. These techniques include agroforestry and planting fields year-round in crops or other cover. Agroforestry systems with greater species diversity “are better able to maximize the storage of carbon than monocultures”.

Rattan Lal from Ohio State University says that restoring soils of degraded and desertified ecosystems has the potential to store an additional 1 billion to 3 billion tons of carbon annually in the world’s soils, equivalent to roughly 3.5 billion to 11 billion tons of CO2 emissions.

Not only is returning carbon to soils important in the fight against climate change, but also in feeding a growing population.

To date, most of the emphasis around global warming has been focused on curbing emissions from fossil fuels, however researchers say soil carbon sequestration also needs to part of the picture, in particular restoring degraded and eroded lands, as well as avoiding deforestation and the farming of peatlands. There is more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere; 2,500 billion tons of carbon in soil and 800 billion tones in the atmosphere as well as 560 billion tones in plant and animal life.

Read the full story: Soil as Carbon Storehouse: New Weapon in Climate Fight?