Society should be more committed to promoting sustainability, and contribute to a number of the Sustainable Development Goals in new creative ways. For World Soil Day, three of these efforts come into greater focus as we highlight initiatives that support the cause.
It’s dark and crumbly, and doesn’t look very interesting at first glance, but soil plays a bigger part in our lives than you might realise. 95% of our food comes from soil. What’s more, soil holds three times as much carbon as the atmosphere, which can help us handle the challenges of a changing climate.
To commemorate soil and raise global awareness of its importance, World Soil Day is celebrated every year on the 5th of December, at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) headquarters in Rome, the regional offices, and through national and local events. This year’s theme is “Be the Solution to Soil Pollution,” which aims to raise awareness about the severity of soil pollution and call for people to stop polluting our soil.
The UN has 17 Sustainable Development Goals which address global challenges, and promote a more sustainable future and better quality of life. Four of these goals help facilitate the fight against soil pollution by having objectives which take into account our natural resources and how they relate to food and security.
We should all strive to promote sustainable agriculture in an effort to end hunger. Given that 50% more food will be needed for the world and its growing population by 2050, while our natural resources are being rapidly degraded, we need a more efficient and viable way of producing food (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO, 2017). At ROCKWOOL, our products enable modern horticulture to increase production while using fewer natural resources.
During 2017, we collaborated with Wageningen University in the Netherlands to quantify the positive impact of growing tomatoes and cucumbers in Grodan horticultural growing media which is part of the ROCKWOOL Group compared to greenhouse grown, soilbased crops.