Fertile Ground or Barren Policy? Evaluating Cross-Convention Approaches to Soil Protection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Soils are increasingly recognised as a cornerstone of sustainable development, climate resilience, and biodiversity conservation. They serve as the foundation for terrestrial ecosystems, agricultural productivity, and the regulation of global biogeochemical cycles. Yet, in international environmental law, soils remain conceptually marginal and institutionally fragmented. No dedicated treaty or comprehensive legal regime exists to protect or govern soils holistically. Instead, soils are addressed indirectly and unevenly across a patchwork of multilateral environmental agreements—most notably, the three Rio Conventions adopted in the wake of the 1992 Earth Summit: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). This chapter explores the evolving treatment of soils across these three Conventions, with a focus on the outcomes of the 2024–2025 Conferences of the Parties (COPs). It examines the extent to which soil-related objectives are being integrated across the climate, biodiversity, and land degradation agendas, drawing on the normative framing of the 2024 United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-6) Resolution 6/14 and the Pact for the Future adopted by the UN General Assembly. In so doing, the chapter identifies emerging synergies, persistent gaps, and potential legal entry points for greater cross-regime coherence. Rather than offering prescriptive recommendations, the chapter adopts a descriptive-analytical approach to assess institutional dynamics and legal language. It argues that while high-level aspirations around land restoration and soil health have gained momentum, the operationalisation of these goals remains uneven. Institutional integration across the Rio Conventions is still largely superficial, constrained by distinct mandates, differing legal architectures, and a lack of common monitoring frameworks. Nevertheless, soils present a compelling site for rethinking interlinkages across environmental regimes, offering an opportunity to cultivate more holistic and integrated approaches to global land stewardship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.173 | 0.262 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".