Abstract. Our current information society, populated by increasingly well informed and critical stakeholders, presents a challenge to both the policy and science arena's. The introduction of the UN Sustainable Development Goals offers a unique and welcome opportunity to direct joint activities towards these goals. Soil science, even though it is not mentioned as such, plays an important role in realizing a number of SDG's focusing on food, water, climate, health, biodiversity and sustainable land use. A plea is made for a systems approach to land use studies, to be initated by soil scientists, in which these land-related SDG's are considered in an integrated manner. To connect with policy makers and stakeholders two approaches are functional, following: (i) the policy cycle when planning and executing research, which includes signaling, design, decision, implementation and evaluation. Many current research projects spend little time on signaling which may lead to disengagement of stakeholders. Also, implementation is often seen as the responsibility of others while it is crucial to demonstrate – if successful – the relevance of soil science and (ii) the DPSIR approach when following the policy cycle in land-related research, distinguishing external drivers, pressures, impacts and responses to land-use change that affect the state of the land in past, present and future. Soil science cannot by itself realize SDG's and interdisciplinary studies on Ecosystem Services (ES) provide an appropriate channel to define contributions of soil science in terms of the seven soil functions. ES, in turn, can contribute to addressing the six SDG's (2, 3, 6, 12, 13 and 15) with an environmental, land-related character. SDG's have a societal focus and future soil science research can only be successful if stakeholders are part of the research effort in transdisciplinary projects, based on the principle of time-consuming "joint-learning". The internal organization of the soil science discipline is not yet well – tuned to the needs of inter – and transdisciplinary approaches.
Facing policy challenges with inter- and transdisciplinary soil research focused on the SDG's