Find out more

This was a warning from US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1937. A century later, soil degradation has become a major global challenge with the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation estimating one third of the world’s soils have been damaged in the past fifty years and warning “the fate of our planet, from its ecosystems, natural resources, biodiversity, and people hinges on the state of its soils.” Good soil is essential for nutritious crop growth, carbon storage, flood resilience, and harvesting bio-based materials for discovering new antibiotics, microbial therapeutics, crop biotics, proteins, and genes.  However, it took thousands of years for our soils to form naturally. Unless we learn how to rebuild degraded soils and build new soils from scratch, the world will struggle to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We believe that “a nation that rebuilds its soils rebuilds itself”. 

Soil as a living ecosystem

Durham University is world-leading in climate resilient infrastructure, soil health and crop science and now aims to be at the forefront of a globally significant new research field in nature-based environmental engineering. We challenge the misconception that soil structure is governed by physiochemical properties alone, with new understanding that soil is a living ecosystem with its microbiome key to its life-giving properties.  

Establishing the SMART Soils Lab

We have brought together expertise from Durham’s Engineering, Biosciences, and Sociology departments, as well as staff from across four faculties, along with an array of local and international government, industry and academic partners to set up a world-first, the Soil and Microbiome Augmentation and Restoration Technologies Lab (SMART Soils Lab). SMART Soils is led by environmental engineer Professor Karen Johnson. The SMART Lab will enable environmental engineers and plant scientists to work with communities to design soil and plant restoration technologies which can optimise the ecosystem services that communities need. Working with social scientists will help promote a necessary shift in how society thinks about soil, towards an understanding that soil is living, and an ‘ethics of care’ approach, helping Government, communities and industry to sustainably manage land in both urban and rural environments.  

Accelerating soil restoration 

We do not have the time to wait for soils to rebuild naturally. Our soil engineering technologies will work in harmony with the soil microbiome to rebuild soils within a few years.  We will add both organic and mineral materials to degraded soils to rebuild soil health. We will use materials that are often considered as ‘waste’ to rebuild soils but are in fact resources for the soil microbiome.  Our aim is to put soils at the heart of the UK’s circular economy.  Our rebuilt soils will be better at holding water, better at storing carbon, better for soil biodiversity and will produce more nutritious crops.  We will use artificial intelligence to study our data.  We hope that in future this will allow people from across the world to predict how to rebuild their own degraded soils. 

Showcasing the team behind the work

The people we are showcasing as part of “100 Faces of Science” illustrate the wide range of people involved in making this vision happen.  We include academics from many disciplines, critical technical and professional staff who underpin the research, PhD students who have moved on to apply this knowledge in other places, and educationalists and commercial partners who could help to take the technology forwards.