Stakeholders and synergies of the global soil information system

CSIRO AGRICULTURE & FOOD

Neil McKenzie ITPS Southwest Pacific RepresentativeCSIRO Australia

OverviewGetting our own house in order

• Purpose: don’t stray from the global focus• Strategy: ensure mutual benefit for all INSII members• Regain momentum: let’s learn from past successes and failures• Implementation: establish the core teams now

The global soil challenge

We need a 75% increase in food production by 2050 with severe constraints:

• finite arable land• yield plateaux for major crops • increasing cost of energy, nutrients

and emissions• soil degradation• water scarcity in key regions• biodiversity decline

Current systems of land use are being disrupted by a changing climate

Why do we need a distinct global soil information system?

To answer critical questions at the global scale• How much arable land will be available in coming

decades? • How much food and fiber can it produce? • Where are rates of soil change affecting ecosystem

services? To provide the global context for local decisions

• Most urban people are protected from local resource depletion.

• The soil and water used to support them is scattered all over the planet.

• How do land use decisions in one district, country or region have consequences elsewhere?

To supply a fundamental data set for understanding Earth-system processes

• What are the stores and fluxes of water, carbon, and nutrients?

Priority outputs

• Consistent set of data products– global grid of soil functional properties– global map of soil and land types (polygons)– primary data from soil profiles (i.e. direct measurements)

• Monitoring system– Flexible design– Implementation in priority regions– Addition of SoilStat to the FAO statistical system

• Synthesis, forecasting and interpretation– Regular reports on global soil condition – Supply of information to global reporting mechanisms– Diverse information products available online

People, systems and governance

• The global soil information system requires a significant investment and a major technical effort – synergies will not emerge through voluntary mechanisms

• Critical need for a governance structure that is:– based on a model of partnership and mutual benefit– representative – transparent– committed to scientific and technical excellence

• Essential to establish an international project team with responsibility for delivering Pillar 4

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Mutual benefitWhat should INSII members expect?• Adoption of information standards will save costs and avoid

duplication• Adoption of information standards will provide easier access to

third-party tools (e.g. simulation models, mobile apps)• Training and capability development delivered via Pillar Four will

strengthen national and local soil information delivery • Easier access to the international scientific community and their

technologies (e.g. best practices for digital soil mapping) • International assessments of soil resources for your jurisdiction

will be based on the best available data• Better national decision-making due to the improved context and

better global data sets

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Case studyA decade of lessons from GlobalSoilMap• A program that aimed to apply

digital soil mapping globally• Computationally ambitious but

tractable at the continental and global scale

• Consensus on the minimum data set• A focus on meeting the needs of

disciplines wanting to estimate fluxes, stores and transformations of water, carbon and nutrients

• A test run for Pillar Four that we all need to understand

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Advances in Agronomy Volume 125 (2014)

Enduring and consistent ideas

• The final global product had to be based on the best available data.

• The spatial resolution had to be compatible with other global data sets (e.g. terrain, hydrology, land cover, and land use).

• Soil functional properties relating to water, carbon and nutrients were the priority.

• Every estimate for a soil property had to have an accompanying estimate of uncertainty.

• An enduring and easy-to-update soil information system with online access had to be built rather than a one-off product.

• The methods had to respect the sovereignty of nations.

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Traps and controversies avoided

• Specify the final output rather than how to get there

• The Technical Specifications were not strongly aligned with a specific national or regional approach

• Agreed to focus on the minimum data set rather than an optimal data set

• The use of depth functions avoided complex and intractable issues

• Despite complaints about slow progress, the GlobalSoilMap community steadily produced innovations, breakthroughs and new products

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Make room for diverse approaches

KSS Brisbane 26th October 2016 | Neil McKenzie11 |

Governance

• Relatively simple memorandum of understanding

• Established a flexible regional model that influenced the early days of the GSP

• Voluntary and not intended to bind parties if major funds became available

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Problems of ‘light governance’

• Lack of clarity and transparency within the consortium with regard to decision making

• Vulnerable to dysfunction in some institutions at critical times

• Confusion over the research versus operational aspects of the project – most members were pursuing research objectives

• Unintended message that the Consortium was a club rather than an open entity

• Inconsistent statements on what GlobalSoilMap would achieve

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Other observations

• The Global Financial Crisis came at the wrong time

• Loss of momentum caused by attempts to integrate the project within the Global Soil Partnership

• The timetable was ambitious and remained unchanged even when funds didn’t appear

• A few countries now have a very useful grid-based coverage

• The new global grids from ISRIC emerged from the effort

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www.csiro.au/soil-and-landscape-grid

Priorities for INSII (1)

• Work towards greater clarity of purpose and focus on the global issues

• Ensure greater openness and transparency of governance and fully engage with our stakeholders

• Ensure there is an operational rather than a research focus

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Priorities for INSII (2)

• Make sure we involve the best people and their teams from around the world

• Commit to a culture of collaboration and excellence in everything we do because culture is more powerful than strategy

• Establish the ‘Global Soil Spatial Data Information Centre’, secure sufficient funds, and change the name

• Make the INSII meetings unmissable

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Thank you

Neil McKenzie

Chief Research Scientist

CSIRO Agriculture and Food

Canberra, Australia

t +61 2 6246 4222e neil.mckenzie@csiro.au