From Potential to Implementation: An Innovation Framework to Realize the Benefits of Soil Carbon - Soil Carbon: Science, Management and Policy for Multiple Benefits - page 51

Table 4.1. Examples of land-use and soil management strategies to sequester organic carbon in the soil.

System Land-use practices

Land use Afforestation; permanent crops; improved pastures with low stocking rate;

multiple crop systems; land restorative measures (e.g. use of chemical
fertilizers, planted fallows, erosion control); conversion of marginal arable land
to grassland, forest or wetland; restricted or adapted agricultural use of
organic soils; paludicultures; wetland restoration; intensification of prime
agricultural land (e.g. erosion control, supplemental irrigation; soil fertility
management; improved crop assortment; reduction of fallow)

Farming systems Farming systems with high diversity (e.g. mixed farming, agroforestry,

silvopastoral and agri-silvopastoral systems)

Tillage Conservation tillage, mulch farming, reduction of plough-intensive systems

Fertility maintenance Judicious use of fertilizers and organic amendments; improving fertilizer use

efficiency; nutrient cycling through cover crops and planted fallows; enhanced
biological nitrogen fixation

Pest management Integrated pest management (IPM), selective use of chemicals

1. Tillage methods and residue manage-
ment (e.g. conservation tillage, cover crops,
mulch farming).
2. Soil fertility and nutrient management
(e.g. for macronutrients and micronutrients,
strengthening nutrient cycling mechanisms
to minimize losses).
3. Water management (e.g. supplemental irri-
gation, surface and subsoil drainage, soil-water
management, water harvesting).
4. Erosion control (e.g. runoff management
with terraces, vegetative barriers, soil sur-
face amendment and mulch farming).
5. Crop selection, plant breeding (improved
varieties) and rotation.

What are the Bottlenecks
to Implementation?

The question is why, despite the knowledge
we have about how to enhance SOC tech-
nically in different land systems (see above),
such knowledge is not being sufficiently put
into practice? We posit that the key reason
is the mismatch between private and social
benefits and the costs of SOC management
across temporal and spatial scales. While
the longer-term interests largely run parallel
among the larger spatial scales (from the
global to the regional/national) and organ-
izational scales (global to national political
institutions), the shorter-term interests of
localized individual land users diverge
from sustainable SOC management.
This implies that it is necessary to con-
sider SOC improvements across spatial and
temporal scales (Chapter 3, this volume;
Table 4.1 ):

Depending on the land system, and agroeco-
logical setting, various combinations of
these strategies may need to be prioritized
( Table 4.1 ).
Table 4.1 shows that numerous, mainly
conventional, practices exist for improving soil
and water management in order to increase the
concentration of SOC. Any increase in SOC
content, that is soil organic matter, is likely
to have an overall beneficial impact on soil
ecosystem services (Chapter 2, this volume).
The question is therefore: if more SOC is as-
sociated with overall societal benefits, why is
its sequestration not massively pursued? What
limits the implementation of well-known
techniques? What are the bottlenecks? And:
what kind of innovative techniques and pro-
cedures are needed to change the situation?

• in space, i.e. on the farm, catchment,

national and up to the global scale;

• in time, i.e. from seasonal management

operations to intergenerational periods of
decades that address sustaining soil eco-
system functions in the longer term.

The chain between decisions and impacts
across spatial scales is presented in Chapter 3,
this volume, and is summarized briefly here.
Soil ecosystem functions operate and are