A new FAO project supports national systems to measure the soil’s organic carbon content in 7 Latin American countries to mitigate climate change.
Fighting soil degradation in order to advance climate change mitigation.
FAO will support seven Latin American countries to improve their information on the state and health of their soils and to generate productive and sustainable, a measure that will help to mitigate climate change, the international organization said today.
One of the main objectives of the new project of the Organization of the The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which will assist Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, will be to establish national maps of organic carbon of the soil and a harmonized regional map.
These will be key tools to fill the information gap that exists in these issues today, and thus strengthen the capacity of adaptation to climate change and mitigation of its negative effects on the agricultural sector.
In the region, the most serious threats to land today are erosion, loss of organic carbon and salinisation of land, and advice to farmers and land users wishing to restore land is key.
According to FAO data, 14 % of the world’s lands exposed to degradation are in Latin America and the Caribbean, while, globally, 33% of the land is already degraded.