Wednesday, 18 June 2025
The Global Symposium on Soil Biodiversity hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) kicked off on April 19, 2021, with a call to preserve this vast community of living soil organisms and the vital ecosystem services they provide.
Soils host more than 25 percent of the world’s supply of this valued resource from where 95 percent of the food we eat is produced.
The FAO Director-General QU Dongyu pointed out to almost 5000 participants at the opening session that to reverse this trend, all efforts to manage, conserve and protect global biodiversity must also include this invisible array of microorganisms beneath the Earth’s surface.
To this end, he noted that sustainably managing soil biodiversity and preventing its loss needed to be integrated into global environmental frameworks, including the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, to be adopted at the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) and the UN Food Systems Summit.
Minister for Agriculture and Livestock of Costa Rica Luis Renato Alvarado Rivera said that agriculture would continue feeding humanity, underlining the importance of keeping soils healthy, while stressing the need to develop innovative technologies to promote soil conservation.
FAO views biodiversity as the basis of food security and promotes its sustainable use for food security and nutrition, human and environmental well-being and development worldwide.
