Toward soil health assessment in a life cycle perspective: Linking soil stressors to damage to ecosystem services

Abstract

• Soil organisms are the basis for soil processes and resulting functions and services. • Current soil health assessment frameworks and existing life cycle impact assessment methods can learn from each other. • We propose a full damage pathway that connects soil stressor emissions and land use to the loss of ecosystem services. Healthy soils are essential for life on Earth and a prerequisite for maintaining various important ecosystem services. As a result, management recommendations to improve soil health are increasingly being incorporated into legislation. Several frameworks for evaluating soil health have been proposed in the past three decades. However, our understanding of how soil biodiversity loss translates into damage to relevant soil functions and related ecosystem services remains scattered. To address this gap, we evaluated the scientific literature to map how different terrestrial organisms contribute to specific soil processes and functions, and ultimately how the loss of functional diversity leads to damage across 12 distinct soil-related ecosystem services. Drawing inspiration from life cycle impact assessment, we propose a full damage pathway that connects soil stressors (such as greenhouse gas emissions or land use) via fate, exposure and effect mechanisms on soil ecosystems, to the loss of soil functions and the services provided by soil. This is a first step toward the development of a systematic soil health assessment approach that considers the loss of soil functions and services as areas of protection, in alignment with life cycle assessment methods.