Politics of soils and agriculture in a warming world

Soils are essential for life and civilization. They have a long history of political attention, documented at least since Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. Soil played a key political role in the founding of the USA but gradually lost its clout in the last hundred years. The recent IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land may symbolize a return of soils to the political arena. The renewed political interest should be harnessed to leverage sustainable land management, which can create synergies between climate-change mitigation and adaptation while attending to a nexus of additional environmental and socio-economic predicaments. This chapter provides a brief history of the political importance of soils, its links to climate change, and how vested economic and political interests perpetuate unsustainable agricultural practices. It ends on a positive note by outlining a pathway towards a sustainable agricultural future.