This is a nice initiative that I fully support. These guidelines give a comprehensive account of the ecosystem services of agricultural soils (especially!) and the principal ways on how the soil should be managed to maintain and even imporvie the ecosystem services provided. It reads more like set of principles than actual guidelines, 'maintain soil cover', for example. Whether SSM is acheived or whether these guidelines are enought to acheive the SDG of course depends on the implementation. And maybe some general observations could be inlcuded on how to implement these guidelines in the face of the many challenges mentioned in the document. These general guidelines/principles seem to apply to situations in which the ESS are intact and need to be maintained, but less to those situations in which these services are compromised and need to be restored. I would like to see reference to soil degradation as one of the major challenges to implement these guidelines and achieve SSM. It seems that Conservation Agriculture is seen as the major mechanism to implement SSM, and like others have remarked I also do not agree with that. See further comments in the attched document.
Forum members,
This is a nice initiative that I fully support. These guidelines give a comprehensive account of the ecosystem services of agricultural soils (especially!) and the principal ways on how the soil should be managed to maintain and even imporvie the ecosystem services provided. It reads more like set of principles than actual guidelines, 'maintain soil cover', for example. Whether SSM is acheived or whether these guidelines are enought to acheive the SDG of course depends on the implementation. And maybe some general observations could be inlcuded on how to implement these guidelines in the face of the many challenges mentioned in the document. These general guidelines/principles seem to apply to situations in which the ESS are intact and need to be maintained, but less to those situations in which these services are compromised and need to be restored. I would like to see reference to soil degradation as one of the major challenges to implement these guidelines and achieve SSM. It seems that Conservation Agriculture is seen as the major mechanism to implement SSM, and like others have remarked I also do not agree with that. See further comments in the attched document.
Regards, Jeroen Huising