Towards Sustainable Land Management for Enhancing Food Security While Mitigating Climate Change Impacts: The Role of Nuclear and Isotopic Techniques

摘要

The continuing need to enhance food security and reduce the impacts of climate change demands an action plan that leads to sustainable soil and water management. Nuclear and isotopic techniques (NITs) are used as tracers to understand the processes occurring in soil-water-plant systems and their complex interactions, and to provide comprehensive soil-water management technologies tailored to specific agro-ecosystems. One of the missions of the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food andAgriculture is to assist IAEA and FAO Member States to establish their capacities to use nuclear-based methods to develop land (soil and water) management technologies for sustainable food security and conservation of natural resources. This paper provides an overview of the strategies/ approaches and relevant NITs used by national agricultural research and development institutes in projects supported by the Soil and Water Management & Crop Nutrition (SWMCN) Subprogramme of the Joint FAO/IAEA Divisionto increase natural (soil and water) and agricultural (e.g. applied fertilizers) resource use efficiency, enhance soil quality and its resilience against degradation (e.g. through salini-zation and erosion) and minimize the impacts of climate change on soil and agricultural water resources. These activities are grouped into: (i) managing soils for enhancing crop production; (ii) preserving and protecting soil resources; (iii) managing soils for climate change adaptation and mitigation; and (iv) agricultural water management under climate change. This overview highlights several advances in the development and use of NITs and the successful transfer of these to Member States for sustainable management of soil and water resources in agroecosystems. Although NITs offer comparative advantages of high specificity, accuracy and sensitivity over conventional techniques, neither should be used in isolation; rather they should be integrated to maximize their potential in unravelling processes that influence the complexity of soil-water-plant interactions at scales ranging from field plots to the catchment (area-wide) level.