I think the document lacks a section in the document for the soil's role as a store of carbon and climate stabilizer. It is briefly mentioned but needs explicit description alongsside the other functional roles of soil.
Carbon stocks in soil represent both a risk and opportunity for climate change. A risk if areas still high in carbon are mismanaged or temperatures rise causing increased mineralization to CO2. But also an opportunity in that major agricultural countries such as Australia have emptied much of their original carbon stores and have now the opportunity to increase them towards original levels.
The French 4 permille initiative launched at COP-21 describes well the opportunity and win win situation for increasing carbon in soils and buying us more time while we transition from a fossil to a bioeconomy.
Also I think biochar should be mentioned in this section as a innovative method for stabilizing soil organic carbon. The discovery in Mao et al. 2012 that 40-50% of soil organic carbon in a Mollisol was prarie-fire derived carbon underlines the role that
biochar may play in long term fertility in soils and is an important finding. This article also explains the how biochar helped to create the enduring fertility in Terra preta soils.
The IPCC has included in their models that in order to keep global temperatures under 2 degrees, we will require the use of carbon negative solutions, and thus carbon capture by plants and long term storage in soil with biochar can be one such carbon negative solution, that more people should be aware of (Smith, 2016).
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