Soil Security is a crucial part of the answer to securing Australia's long-term economic and environmental future - plants live in it, off it and can't live without it, it feeds our population, it has a reciprocal relationship with water, and is essential to mitigating climate change.

Australian wildlife and flora are protected under national legislation, yet our soils; our nation's breadbaskets, are currently given no consideration in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act).

We Australians call on you, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, and all other MPs in our nation’s parliament, to use the Commonwealth’s powers to protect our nation’s soil and land (our landscapes). Now.

• Soil is the foundation of life, where food is grown, the basis of landscape health and a critical enabler of the water cycle
  
  
• The climate and desertification crises are inextricably linked to soil mismanagement; making soil security a key commitment to combat climate change
  
  
• The state of our land changes how heat is absorbed, emitted and processed, and consequently how heat affects atmospheric processes, including subsequently being captured by carbon
  
  
• In Australia primary production, farming, accounts for 60 per cent of our land mass. How we farm is critical to the nation’s wellbeing and our climate regulation
  
  
• We must price the external costs of our economic activity, particularly farming, on the environment. Australia must account for the degradation of our natural capital to properly consider future socio-economic risks
  
  
• Soil must be protected in Australia’s premier piece of environmental legislation, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, within the proposed national environmental standards
  
  
• Australia needs a national agriculture strategy and a food security plan, integral to both is the development of regional Landscape Management plans, supported by a new profession, Landscape Science. Cultivating a locally focused landscape management response

We make this urgent demand, knowing that:
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Without restoring our land we will continue to experience extreme and increasingly frequent climatic events. The uniformity and simplification of ecosystems in Australian agriculture is destabilising the ‘web of life’.

Dynamic, healthy and resilient ecosystems are complex, supporting biodiversity through interconnected and interdependent environments. Given most biological activity occurs underground, Australia needs to secure and permanently protect our soils and landscapes in Commonwealth law. We must restore the dirt we’ve cultivated to soil.

The lustre of our “sunburnt country” is failing as the terror of “flood and fire and famine” wreak havoc on our nation’s prosperity. Care for country and our obligation to protect Earth’s natural wonders for future generations, compels this urgent call for action. You must act to restore Australia’s soil, rejuvenate our land and secure our future.

We call on you to act. Now. 

Read more in our CEO Phil Mulvey's Book: Ground Breaking

Learn more about Soil Carbon Sequestration: www.carboncount.com