Soil-Centric Approaches Towards Climate-Resilient Agriculture

Soil-centric approaches mainly focus on management of soil for the improvement of soil organic carbon (SOC) which plays a major role in sustaining the soil fertility vis-a-vis productivity. This kind of approach is the need of the hour particularly in the tropics and sub-tropics where the soil having very low amount of soil organic carbon (SOC) even less than 0.5% only. The main pillars of soil-centric approach are conservation agriculture, no-tillage system, using cover crops and mulching. All these can play very crucial roles in increasing the SOC when applied for long-term basis. Changing climatic scenario has great influence on soil formation as well as soil fertility. Such as elevated CO2 level in the soil as well as raise in the soil temperature largely manipulate the soil micro-biome and availability of nutrients to the plants. Thus, under this situation, the importance of adopting soil-centric approaches is massive to maintain the sustainability in the agricultural production system. Carbon sequestration is very important aspect under soil-centric approach. This is crucial to mitigate climate change as well as improving the soil as a whole. Both the above ground and below ground carbon sequestration are very much crucial to maintain the carbon-cycle and reducing the adverse impact of climate change caused by elevated CO2 level in the atmosphere. Soil-centric approach ensures the lockdown of carbon in belowground condition more than other soil management approaches. In this chapter, efforts have been made to elaborate the concepts of soil-centric approaches and their importance under changing climatic scenario.