29 August 2026 ยท Policy
The world's soils are getting worse, but the livestock story is changing
The FAO published the Status of the World's Soil Resources 2026 last week, its first full global soil assessment since 2015, launched at the UN desertification conference in Ulaanbaatar. The findings are poor. Soil management was rated poor or very poor across 52.5 percent of the regions assessed, 58 percent of areas have deteriorated since 2015, and around a third of land globally is now moderately to highly degraded. Erosion remains the largest single threat. The report is equally clear that the practices needed to reverse this already exist and are simply not being adopted at the necessary scale.
What caught my attention was not the diagnosis, which was expected, but the company it was launched in. The same conference adopted decisions on protecting and restoring rangelands and grasslands, supporting pastoralists, and moving toward nature positive agriculture, backed by roughly 1.2 billion dollars across 45 projects in 23 countries. The accompanying rangelands assessment directly challenges the assumption that pastoralism is primarily a driver of degradation, identifying drought, cropland expansion, urbanisation and the fragmentation of grazing routes as the real pressures instead.
That matters, because it moves the argument from whether livestock belong on the land to how they are managed on it, which is a question a farmer can act on. It also treats soil biodiversity loss as a ranked threat in its own right, with nematodes and the wider soil food web named as the machinery behind nutrient cycling and carbon stability.
None of this means grazing is always beneficial. It means the binary was never accurate, and the funded policy position has finally caught up.