Life in Soil & its importance to our future – Prof. Colin Campbell

Life in soil consists of a vast biological diversity that exceeds that of all other ecosystem compartments. Understanding this life provokes new thinking of how we should care for soil and how we value it. Soil has an important part to play in our lives, supporting many key life support functions for the planet and civilisation, and as we appreciate its value more and see the extent of the threat to our way of life from climate change, we have to ask if soil is too valuable even for growing food? But how will we support food production in the future if we wish to rest, restore and regenerate soil? Examples of transformative ways of growing food by designing greater diversity into our food producing systems will be discussed including new agro-ecological approaches and advanced plant growing systems such as Indoor Vertical Farming.

Professor Colin D Campbell is the Chief Executive of the James Hutton Institute and has been a soil scientist for over 30 years studying life in soil and how it supports both managed and natural ecosystems. He has broad interest in sustainable development and has developed the vision and mission of the Institute around the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He sits on the Scottish Government’s Forum for Natural Capital and has led research programmes on using the Ecosystem Approach to solve problems around land use decisions. He served on the RSE Commission of Inquiry “Facing up to Climate Change” and was a contributing author to the UK National Ecosystem Assessment. He has acted as an expert advisor and participant in several EU and UK Government workshops addressing issues of the sustainable use of soils. He has been a Guest and Visiting Professor in the Soil and Environment Department, Swedish Agricultural Sciences University (SLU), Uppsala, Sweden and has worked in Australia and China looking at semi-tropical and temperate ecosystems there.

This is an online talk.  Please register for the talk on our Eventbrite page so that we can send you a joining link. Please note: registration will close at 5pm on the day of the talk (or earlier if all the tickets are allocated).  This is to ensure that everyone is sent the joining link in a timely fashion.