Soil-Food-Environment-Health Nexus for Sustainable Development

Baojing Gu; Deli Chen; Yi Yang; Peter Vitousek; Yong-Guan Zhu

doi:10.34133/2021/9804807

Soil-Food-Environment-Health Nexus for Sustainable Development

Research (Wash D C). 2021 Apr 29:2021:9804807. doi: 10.34133/2021/9804807. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Baojing Gu^{1

2}, Deli Chen³, Yi Yang⁴, Peter Vitousek⁵, Yong-Guan Zhu^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ College of Environmental and Resource Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China.
² Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Agricultural Resources and Environment, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China.
³ School of Agriculture and Food, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia.
⁴ Key Laboratory of the Three Gorges Reservoir Region's Eco-Environment, Ministry of Education, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400045, China.
⁵ Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
⁶ Key Lab of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, Fujian 361021, China.
⁷ Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100085, China.

Abstract

Changes in soil properties and processes can influence food and environmental quality, thus, affecting human health and welfare through biogeochemical cascades among soil, food, environment, and human health. However, because many soil properties change much more slowly than do management practices and pollution to soil, the legacy of past influences on soil can have long-term effects on both human health and sustainability. It is essential and urgent to manage soils for health and sustainability through building the soil-food-environment-health nexus.