Speech prepared for delivery at the launch of the Report “Towards Zero pollution: launch of the Global Assessment of Soil Pollution report”
Thank you to Dr. Qu Dongyu and to H.E. David Choquehuanca for your remarks and introduction to this important piece of research on soil pollution.
This report comes out amidst the intensifying triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity and nature loss, and pollution and waste. A triple crisis that threatens human health, prosperity, equality and peace. But is also comes out as we embark on an ambitious effort to do something about this triple crisis: the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.
The restoration decade is a great opportunity to change course. A great opportunity to mobilize a global movement to halt and reverse the damage humanity has caused to the natural world. A great opportunity to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals, slow climate change and buy time to decarbonize our economies and societies.
As an international community, we must deliver on our commitments to protect and restore ecosystems during the decade. And backing healthy and productive soils must be foundational to the decade, for so many reasons.
Over 90 per cent of our food comes from the soil. It stores more carbon than the atmosphere and all the world’s vegetation combined. It holds incredible biodiversity, from worms to microbes, that maintain fertility. Overall, soil biodiversity and soil carbon contribute an estimated USD 1.5 trillion of ecosystems services globally each year.
Yet it is so easy to take the soil for granted. It is beneath our feet, in our fields, our gardens, our window boxes. As a result, most people assume it is endless and indestructible. This report, summarized in detail by Dr. Qu, tell us otherwise.
So, the restoration decade has to focus on addressing the pollution of soil ecosystems, for the sake of our own and the planet’s health. How do we do this? Let me lay out some actions in four areas, drawn largely from the report and UNEP’s framework for a pollution-free planet.
First, and this is blindingly obvious, we have to stop the pollution.
Not one of us would pour a cocktail of toxic chemicals into a plant pot then eat the tomatoes we grew there for dinner – if anything grew at all. Yet this is what we are doing on a global scale: in mining, in industry, in waste, in unsustainable agricultural practices. We are poisoning the soils, and so ourselves. It has to stop.
We can start in agriculture, by adopting sustainable practices, such as integrated pest management guidelines for more efficient use of fertilizers and environmentally friendly pesticides. Ahead of the Food Systems Summit, we should be thinking about more diverse and regenerative cropping systems. Systems that accommodate healthy crop rotation, and enable more diverse diets, which will reduce pressure on soils and allow degraded and polluted soils to recover in a productive way.
We can stop uncontrolled dumping and deal with pollutants before they start leaking. We can invest in long-term environmental monitoring following industrial closures.
At a systemic level, we can accelerate the transition to sustainable consumption and production and circular economies. Food waste and food loss, for example, consumes and pollutes land for no reason. Fast fashion means we are using increasingly more land to grow fibre for clothes that don’t last. E-waste is a major source of pollutants, leaking out heavy metals on landfills the seep into the soil.
Applying the basic principles of circularity and resource efficiency – reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose, repair – will protect the soil and ease the triple planetary crisis in many other ways.
Second, we have to reverse the damage.
We have to clean up contaminated sites. For the health of local communities. To allow the land to deliver ecosystem services. To free up land for sustainable agriculture production, preventing the need for further conversion. But we have to clean up in the right way.
There is a nursery rhyme in which an old lady who swallows a fly tries to fix the problem by swallowing a spider, then a bird, then increasingly large creatures. It doesn’t end well. Cleaning up sites mechanically or by using chemicals poses similar risks. In eliminating the contaminant, we may cause wider ecosystem damage.
This is why nature-based soil remediation techniques are so important. As the report shows, there are many different plants and organisms that can eliminate pollutants and restore soil balance. Given our need to live in harmony with nature, this is where our focus should lie.
And let’s be clear: the polluter should pay. This is a basic principle that our parents taught us, and parents today teach their children. You make a mess, you clean it up.
Third, and closely linked to this last point, we need stronger enforcement.
Most harmful soil contaminants are regulated by global conventions, such as the Basel, Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions and the Minamata Conventions. These are in many places supplemented by regional agreements.
These conventions have achieved much, but could do more with stronger implementation and coordination. Equally, countries that are not parties to these conventions should be strongly encouraged to bring them into force and to apply all necessary resources.
We also need a stronger push on environmental law and enforcement – through courts and global backing for the right to a healthy environment. If polluters will not stop or clean up, the law must make them. This is increasingly happening, as we saw last week when a Dutch court ordered a major oil company to slash its emissions by 2030.
Finally, we need to make sure the science travels.
This report strengthens the science on soil pollution. Now we need to make sure it gets to the right people. Not just to politicians and scientists. To farmers. Businesses. Consumers. Local law enforcement. We need everyone to understand that healthy soils mean healthy people and a healthy planet.
So, as we launch the UN Decade on Restoration, we must ensure everybody does what they can to ensure soil health through halting and reversing pollution. This will be essential to the success of the decade, the Sustainable Development Goals, the upcoming new biodiversity framework and, in the end, the future of humanity.
We at UNEP thank FAO for their valuable partnership on this crucial issue and look forward to a long and successful collaboration as we all seek to be the solution to soil pollution.
Thank you.
Executive Director
