Soil Carbon Stock and Sequestration: Implications for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation

The land resource and other natural resources are degrading day by day due to human greed of development and unsustainable management. These will not only affect the ecosystem structure and related services but also disturb environmental sustainability and overall ecological stability at global scale. Today, climate change becomes most highlighted and burning issue among policy makers, stakeholders, scientists, and academicians across various national and international platforms. However, the climate change and other perturbation have altered the natural balance of different ecosystems resulting into poor ecosystem services. This will not only affect yield and productivity but also affect ecosystem health in many dimensions. In this context, capturing of carbon (C) through the process of C sequestration will increase C values in vegetation and soil as soil organic carbon (SOC) pools that directly or indirectly link with food-soil-climate security. Soil organic matter (SOM) and C are the key management strategies for managing land resources wisely. Updated and advance technologies of soil C-friendly management are the major mitigatory strategy for different ecosystems. Soil C management requires the practices which add C inputs in soil instead removing the soil C and nutrients reserve. The land-use systems must be eco-friendly and sustainable one to stop the land degradation and deterioration. Sustained research and developmental activities are needed to generate C dynamics knowledge base which subsequently helps to visualize the changes in soil C quantity and impact on the atmospheric C. Moreover, this information supports for terrestrial C management and climate change adaptation and mitigation. In the view of the above, a rigorous and comprehensive discussion has been made on soil C sequestrations in varying land use practices (forest, agroforestry, and fruits based land use system, etc.) and its role in climate change mitigation to achieve the goal of sustainable environment and maintaining overall ecological stability.