Soil erosion is a major threat to food security and ecosystem viability, as current rates are orders of magnitude higher than natural soil formation. Governments around the world are trying to address the issue of soil erosion. However, we do not know whether countries have much actual control over their soil erosion. Here, we use a high-resolution, global dataset with over 35 million observations and a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify how much of the global rate of soil erosion is actually affected by countries and which country characteristics, including their policies, are associated with this.

Overall, moving just across the border from one country to the next, the rate of soil erosion changes on average by ~1.4 t ha−1 yr−1, which reveals a surprisingly large country effect. The best explanation we find is countries’ agricultural characteristics.

Published in Nature Sustainability, Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2020
Potential of uncontested lands
Restoring degraded landscapes for conservation purposes can involve transaction costs to acquire the land in the first place. McDonald-Madden and colleagues propose a framework for prioritizing uncontested lands that can provide ecosystem services without those costs.