A Strategy for Taking Soil Carbon into the Policy Arena - Soil Carbon: Science, Management and Policy for Multiple Benefits - page 64

Sustainable land management implies the wise
use of land, which encompasses the principle
that mined nutrients must also be restored.
Crops require an instant flow of nutrients at
specific growth stages. Mineral fertilizers are
the quickest and surest way of supplying the
nutrients in known amounts, proportions and
available forms ready for uptake by plants, and
hence the surest way of also building C stocks.
However, the amount of inorganic fertilizers
used at local level is low. The cost of fertilizers
coupled with that of seeds, pesticides and
other requirements are out of reach to
resource-poor farmers. Most of the small-scale
farmers use organic fertilizers such as farm-
yard manure and compost and recycle crop
residues as a means of sustaining and im-
proving land productivity. However, the
limited amounts of organic sources of plant
nutrients and their very low fertilizer grades
mitigate reliance on them as stand-alone
sources of nutrient supply. Since farmers'
operations will always have an impact on
land quality and SOC benefits at the local
level, recommendations on land manage-
ment must consider their goals, resource
capacity, socio-economic circumstances and
field production conditions.

implementation of good management and
strategies at the farmer/stakeholders level.
The institutions that are supposed to
address land issues are lacking frameworks,
especially in relation to SOC. The import-
ance of SOC is mostly hidden within other
related disciplines in most national govern-
ments and is not given the prominence it
deserves. The role of traditional institutions
and land rights is also not explicit. Invest-
ment in land improvement programmes is
limited in some parts of the world. Inter-
national organizations should be able to
provide resources through national govern-
ments so that the agenda of SOC conserva-
tion can be realized at the national level.
Appropriate policies should focus primar-
ily on land planning, legal frameworks and
regulatory mechanisms linked with efficient
economic incentives to assure the compli-
ance of soil and SOC improvement at the
national level.

Sustainable development
at the international level

At the global level, there is an increasing
interest in land as a resource that should be
preserved. The Multilateral Environmental
Agreements (MEA from the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC), Convention on Biological Diver-
sity (CBD) and United Nations Convention
to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)), re-
visited last year during the Rio+20 Sustain-
able Development Conference, identified
the importance of land. During the confer-
ence, it has been agreed to aim towards a
Land Degradation Neutral World as a global
effort to fulfil soil protection and soil restor-
ation activities (Chapter 29, this volume).
More recently, during the second meeting
of the Intergovernmental Science Policy
Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem
Services (IPBES) Plenary (IPBES-2) held
in Antalya, Turkey, in December 2013, the
work programme for 2014-2018 was adopted
and it included a thematic assessment
aiming to enhance the knowledge base for
policies to address land degradation, desert-
ification and the restoration of degraded
land.

Enabling policy environment to promote
sustainable land-use management
at the national level

At the national level, there exist shortcom-
ings in some parts of the world in policy de-
velopment and implementation in the area
of land use and management (e.g. lack of
National Action Plans, or malfunctioning
of these). Appropriate policies should focus
on national land planning, market-oriented
tools and legal frameworks for natural re-
sources management as well as for land ten-
ure (e.g. access, control and ownership).
The implementation of an unfavourable pol-
icy and legal environment in potential areas
for good land management in conjunction
with local market distortions has exacer-
bated the problem of low land productivity.
There is a lack of coherence between market
drivers, land-use policy and formal institu-
tional arrangements, which creates a lack
of coordination and communication in the