Soil health finally got its own day at a UN COP

Why we sent someone to a desertification COP

Soil rarely gets its own headline. It shows up inside food systems, inside climate, inside biodiversity, and it leaves the room before anyone writes it down as a commitment.

That changed in August. At the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, held in Ulaanbaatar under the theme "Restoring Land. Restoring Hope.", the agenda carried a Food Systems and Soil Health Day. Not a side event. A named day, with a High-Level Ministerial Dialogue attached to it. [1]

Berenice Di Biase represented Soilytix. We called her afterwards and asked what actually happened, why she chose this event over everything else available, and what it changes for anyone who works with soil data. This is that conversation, organised.

What COP17 was

The UNCCD is the least famous of the three Rio Conventions. Climate has UNFCCC. Biodiversity has the CBD. Land degradation has the UNCCD, and it has historically drawn less attention and less money than either of its siblings. That is exactly why what happened on the agenda matters.

1. Soil health got named, and naming is not cosmetic

Berenice's first point was the one that sounds procedural and is not.

Agenda items are the unit of work at a COP. A named day gets a chair, a ministerial dialogue, prepared national positions, and a line in the reporting that follows. A topic that only lives inside another topic gets none of that. It gets mentioned.

The practical consequence arrives later, and somewhere else entirely. Language that appears on a UN agenda tends to migrate into corporate sustainability reporting, into procurement questionnaires, and into the questions a supplier gets asked in a tender. "Soil health" is now a term with an official venue behind it.

The day did not appear on the agenda by itself. Berenice traced it back to a specific piece of work, led by Andrea Meza Murillo, Deputy Executive Secretary of the UNCCD, who co-chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Healthy Soils and Land with Professor Rattan Lal of Ohio State University. [3]

The group published The Hidden Economic Power of Healthy Soils with the World Economic Forum, developed together with the UNCCD. [2]

That paper is the economic argument underneath the agenda change, and it explains why the private sector engaged the way it did. Up to 40 per cent of the world's land is degraded, costing the global economy an estimated USD 878 billion a year and directly affecting 3.2 billion people. [2]

The paper does not stop at the global figure. It carries four case studies, and the one that speaks most directly to anyone working with soil data is Yara's NossoCafe coffee programme in Brazil. On Fazenda Santa Barbara in Minas Gerais, a 6.7 hectare management area inside a 63 hectare coffee farm was run under outcome-based monitoring from 2021 to 2023. Against a control, soil fertility attributes improved by 14 per cent, nitrogen use efficiency by 24 per cent, the coffee carbon footprint fell by 32 per cent, and the farm generated an additional R$8,307 per hectare. [2]

What made that possible was not a single practice. It was measuring soil across physical, chemical and biological indicators, on the same farm, over three seasons, against a control, and reporting soil outcomes and business outcomes inside one framework. The paper's own conclusion from its four cases is blunt on this point: measurement is what enables management, and ROI figures are meaningless unless you carry the practice, geography, crop and baseline along with them.

That is the argument of this post in one farm. The number that moved the business was not the soil measurement. It was what the measurement let someone manage.

So the sequence runs in one direction. A council builds the economic case, the UNCCD carries it into the convention, and the agenda gains a day. The paper and the day are the same piece of work at two stages.

2. The private sector showed up, and it talked about risk

COP17 was, in Berenice's account, one of the editions with the strongest private sector participation so far. Leaders from large agri and agri-tech companies were present, including major players across agriculture and agri-tech.

They were not there as observers. The position they were pushing is that soil health has to be accounted for inside their own operations and across their supply chains.

The framing is the part worth noticing:

Fashion is in that sentence for a reason. Cotton, linen, wool and leather all sit on top of soil, several steps upstream of anything a consumer sees. The de-risking argument works even for a company with no interest in soil, because it is an argument about supply continuity.

The WEF paper puts a number on that exposure. When LVMH assessed its dependencies under the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, it found that 58.4 per cent of its raw material volumes depend on soil quality, soil formation and nutrient cycling, that more than 85 per cent of the agricultural land surface behind those materials is exposed to high soil-quality risk, and that more than 40 per cent of its soil-dependent raw materials already come from regions affected by soil degradation. [2]

The point of that assessment was not the disclosure. It was that the numbers named specific sourcing regions, from grapes in France and Argentina to cashmere in Mongolian rangelands, which is what turns an environmental dependency into something procurement can act on.

That changes who asks the question:

The second column is a very different customer from the first. It does not want a snapshot. It wants a baseline it can defend and re-measure.

3. Why a COP, and why this one

We asked Berenice directly: out of every event she could have attended, why this one.

Her answer was about the room, not the programme.

This mix of policymakers and industry decision-makers makes COP a venue worth attending on its own terms: it is one of the few places where regulatory direction and commercial priorities can be discussed face to face, in the same week, with the people who set them.”

Ministers and business leaders in one venue is genuinely hard to find. For Soilytix the value was understanding three things at once: how the public sector is shaping regulation, where private capability can realistically contribute, and where public-private cooperation on land degradation can actually be built rather than announced.

4. One health: soil sits under more of the system than it gets credit for

The framing that came up most across the two weeks was one health: the approach that treats human, animal and environmental health as a single system rather than three separate ones.

Soil sits underneath more of that system than its public profile suggests. It stores carbon, which connects it to the atmosphere and makes it a climate lever. It filters and holds water, which connects it to the hydrosphere. It produces food, which connects it to diet and to human health.

Pollution travels those same pathways in the other direction, and she was explicit about the route:

One health also does something useful in political terms. It gives soil a claim on health language and health budgets, not only agricultural ones.

5. Why degradation shows up as deforestation

Deforestation is one strand of that same system, and it was the connection Berenice found most immediately useful.

The logic is uncomfortable and simple. Land that yields less does not reduce demand. It moves demand somewhere else, and the somewhere else is usually forest.

Which means productivity on existing farmland is a deforestation lever, not a separate conversation. Keeping soil functional where agriculture already happens is one of the cheaper ways to reduce pressure to clear land that is currently standing.

6. What she took away, and what comes next

We asked her to summarise the two weeks.

On what happens next, she named three things in order.

Convert momentum into working relationships

The phrase worth noticing is "between different private sector parties". Public-private cooperation gets the attention, but companies in the same supply chain measuring soil in incompatible ways is a problem the public sector cannot solve for them.

Unlock finance. This was one of the two themes she said came up repeatedly across the two weeks.

That is a change in register. Restoration finance used to be raised as the awkward question after the science. At COP17 it was stated as the constraint it is, the WEF paper maps the financing ecosystem that would have to exist for it: grant and philanthropic capital to prove concepts, blended and concessional finance to de-risk them, and institutional capital to make natural capital a recognised investment category. Its worked examples run from a public programme reaching 784,500 farmers in Ethiopia to a fund with USD 208 million under management. [2]

Roll out at scale, without assuming one model fits everywhere

That last point cuts against the instinct to standardise everything. Practice has to vary by geography and by what a country can afford. Measurement is where consistency has to hold, so that results from places that farm differently can still be compared.

What we are taking from COP17

1. 1.Soil health is now named. It has its own day at a UN COP, and that day traces back to the UNCCD and the Global Future Council on Healthy Soils and Land work behind the WEF paper. Expect the term to spread into corporate reporting and supplier questions.
2. 2.The buyer is changing. The de-risking argument moves soil out of the sustainability report and into procurement and operations decisions. The LVMH figure, 58.4 per cent of raw material volumes dependent on soil, is the kind of number that moves it there. [2]
3. 3.The bottleneck is scale and standards. Nobody at COP17 was asking for more proof that soil matters. They were asking how to run restoration over large areas and how to compare the results.
4. 4.Standardisation is the constraint we can act on. Comparable outcome data requires consistent protocols and traceable sampling. That is a discipline problem before it is a technology problem.
5. 5.The EU directive sets the clock. The question is no longer whether to measure soil. It is what gets measured, how often, and to what standard, with a 2028 transposition deadline behind it.
6. 6.One health gives soil a wider claim. Soil connects to food, to water, to the atmosphere and to human health, which puts it in budgets and conversations that are not agricultural.
7. 7.Degradation and deforestation are one problem. Productivity on existing farmland belongs in the forest conversation.

Two parts of this report now have posts of their own:

Read: The EU Soil Monitoring Law: what it requires, and when

Read: What is blocking land restoration: scale and standards

FAQ

What is UNCCD COP17?

The 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, held in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, from 17 to 28 August 2026 under the theme "Restoring Land. Restoring Hope." The UNCCD is the UN convention dealing with desertification, land degradation and drought. [1]

What was the Food Systems and Soil Health Day?

A thematic day held on 27 August 2026, including a High-Level Ministerial Dialogue. It was the first time a COP agenda named soil health rather than treating it as a component of food systems. [1]

What is the economic cost of soil degradation?

Up to 40 per cent of the world's land is degraded, costing the global economy an estimated USD 878 billion a year and directly affecting 3.2 billion people. Returns on restoration are real but context dependent. In an integrated soil fertility trial in Western Kenya documented in the WEF paper, every dollar invested returned 3.2 dollars, with yields of 5.4 tonnes per hectare against 2.7 in the control. Any single ROI figure should be read with its practice, geography, crop and baseline attached. [2]

What is the one health approach?

The approach that treats human, animal and environmental health as a single system rather than three separate ones. Applied to soil, it connects soil to food and diet, to water quality, to carbon in the atmosphere, and through pollution back to human and animal health.

How is land degradation connected to deforestation?

When existing agricultural land becomes less productive, demand does not fall, it relocates. The pressure to bring new land into production rises, and that new land is often forest. Maintaining productivity on existing farmland therefore reduces pressure to clear forest.

Why does a soil intelligence company attend a policy conference?

Because monitoring obligations are written by governments and absorbed by companies. Being present is how you learn what will be required, early enough to build measurement that satisfies it.