[Globally] every second, an equivalent of four football fields of healthy soil becomes degraded – adding up to a total of 100 million hectares every year. Non-degraded healthy soil is a direct necessity for 95% of the food production for more than 8 billion people.
For nations across the globe, this degradation is also causing a rapid increase in climate shocks such as droughts, threatening hundreds of millions of lives, crippling livelihoods, and forcing millions of people into migration.
There are unfortunately many studies that point all in a similar direction, and it is not a European but a global problem.
In 2024, for example, a map from the Save Soil movement – backed by the UNEP, UNCCD, UNFAO, WFP, and IUCN amongst others – illustrates that 95% of the Earth’s soil is on course to be degraded by 2050.