SOIL NEXUS: Urban soil care for food production, community greenspace, and environmental resilience.

Global urbanisation is leading to the degradation of living soils, with substantial and direct impacts on climate, biodiversity, food security, and human health. Urban land use policies are beginning to address soil protection. However, they rarely address the depollution and remediation of urban soils and the revitalisation of the agricultural socio-economic fabric, both essential to recover and maintain healthy soils. Instead polluted soils are often managed through further soil sealing (i.e. covering with a plastic ‘geotextile’ layer to isolate it and adding new soil on top). As alternatives, emerging urban communities of practice are currently experimenting with integrated and holistic practices of soil care, such as sourcing urban organic waste streams (food waste, leaves, grass clippings, waste from breweries, ecological paperboard packaging, etc.) for topsoil regeneration or using nature-based approaches (e.g. bioremediation) for the depollution of topsoils. Such practices urgently need enabling and adequate policy frameworks to be mainstreamed and aligned with related policies regarding climate action, green/blue infrastructure and urban food policy plans.