One of the core mandates of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is to improve soil governance at all levels, providing support for countries in strengthening normative and regulatory frameworks with an impact on soil management. As such, FAO’s GSP organized the webinar “Global soil governance: Status and future perspectives” within the framework of the EUROSOIL 2021 conference, which took place on 25th August 2021 in a virtual mode.

Soil governance involves policies, strategies, and the processes of decision-making by nation states and local governments on how the soil is utilized. Governing the soil requires international, national and local collaboration between governments, local authorities, industries and citizens. This is to ensure the implementation of coherent policies that encourage practices and methodologies that regulate the usage of the soil resource to avoid degradation and conflict between users.

The webinar had many eminent speakers with experience on soil governance at different levels. They addressed what was happening at the present time in terms of global and regional soil governance and proposed actions to ensure that sustainable soil management could be successfully promoted and adopted.