Agricultural practices are another victim of the ‘tragedy of horizon’1, “[f]or it takes several thousand years to build a thin layer of fertile topsoil, but only an hour of heavy rain to lose it”.2 While conventional agriculture practices have managed to increase yields, prevailing monocultures and the associated heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides have detrimental effects on biodiversity and soil fertility. Land use practices also have important effects on the climate. Healthy soils serve as carbon sinks. In turn, unsustainable agricultural practices threaten to release more carbon into the atmosphere. The expanding role of the bioeconomy and the associated increasing demand for biomass3 runs the danger of continuing a development path in which fertile soils are degraded or ‘mined’, thus reducing the overall available land for agricultural production. Future climatic changes pose new challenges for the maintenance of healthy and resilience agriculture and the soils on which they are based.

• 1. Elliott, Larry. 2015. ‘Carney Warns of Risks from Climate Change “Tragedy of the Horizon”’. The Guardian, September 29, sec. Environment. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/29/carney-warns-of-risks....
• 2. Unmüßig, Barbara, and Klaus Töpfer. 2015. ‘Introduction’. In Soil Atlas. Facts and Figures about Earth, Land and Fields. Second Edition, 7. Heinrich Böll Foundation and Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies.
• 3. Iglesias, Ana, Sonia Quiroga, Marta Moneo, and Luis Garrote. 2012. ‘From Climate Change Impacts to the Development of Adaptation Strategies: Challenges for Agriculture in Europe’. Climatic Change 112 (1): 143–68.; Lin, Brenda B. 2011. ‘Resilience in Agriculture through Crop Diversification: Adaptive Management for Environmental Change’. BioScience 61 (3): 183–93. doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.4.