Land policy in the context of sustainable development

The UN General Assembly declared 2021–2030 the “Decade of Ecosystem Restoration to Achieve the SDGs,” which means the need to unleash, strengthen and maintain the potential of soils not only for food production, but also for the conservation of water resources, biodiversity and the biosphere as a whole, reducing carbon emissions, increasing resilience in the face of climate change. Soil enters into the composition of all terrestrial ecosystems of a certain hierarchical level as a mandatory and irreplaceable subsystem or component. Russia has the largest soil cover area of approximately 14.5 million km2 – one sixth of the planet. The global importance of the country’s unique soil resources is increasing due to global processes of soil degradation and loss, as well as the impossibility of the soil cover of the world to carry out biospheric functions in the same volume. The authors have analyzed the legal framework for the implementation of sustainable development goals, taking into account the state of soils in Russia. There have been found no documents determining how much soil resources the country requires to conduct modern agricultural production and fulfill the SDGs. The lack of understandable, clear and long-term land policy leads to a lack of complete and objective information about the condition and fertility of soils used in agriculture. The monitoring being carried out at present does not provide monitoring of land plots and crop rotation fields as a production resource. It does not include a number of parameters characterizing soil fertility, which are essential for agricultural production. To implement the provisions of the concept of sustainable development, it is necessary, first of all, to introduce a full-fledged, scientifically based and legal (legally significant), general legal, accurate, unambiguous, definite, well-established, non-contextual definition of soil and its fertility as a fundamental unique property into the federal legislation. Soils, their condition and fertility should be among the mandatory criteria for the effectiveness of land policy and land management, which, in turn, should be defined as a set of measures for studying the state of soils, planning and organizing their rational use and protection. Ensuring national, environmental, economic and food security has interconnected goals. Sustainable development implies “climate neutral” agriculture, where reproduction of soil fertility is necessarily ensured, their degradation being completely excluded.

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