Abstract:
Soils generate agricultural, environmental, and socio-economic benefits that are vital to
human life. The enormity of threats to global soil stocks raises the imperative for securing this vital
resource. To contribute to the security framing and advancement of the soil security concept and
discourse, this paper provides a working definition and proposes dimensions that can underpin the
conceptualization of soil security. In this paper, soil security refers to safeguarding and improving
the quality, quantity and functionality of soil stocks from critical and pervasive threats in order to
guarantee the availability, access, and utilization of soils to sustainably generate productive goods and
ecosystem services. The dimensions proposed are availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability,
which are obviously similar to the dimensions of food security. Availability refers to the quality and
spatial distribution of soils of a given category. Accessibility relates to the conditions or mechanisms
by which actors negotiate and gain entitlements to occupy and use a given soil. Utilization deals
with the use or purpose to which a given soil is put and the capacity to manage and generate optimal
private and public benefits from the soil. Finally, stability refers to the governance mechanisms that
safe guard and improve the first three dimensions. These dimensions, their interactions, and how
they can be operationalized in a strategy to secure soils are presented and discussed
