Making soil erosion understandable and governable at the river basin scale for food, water and hydropower sustainability in Latin America

Soil is a fundamental resource yet every year some 10 million ha of cropland are lost to soil erosion, mostly due to unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices. Erosion impacts overall sustainability in two ways: (a) reduction in farmland for food production, and (b) discharge of sediments and associated contaminants into water courses polluting water supply, fisheries and aquaculture, and reducing hydropower capacity due to reservoir siltation. Soil erosion and its environmental impacts sit centrally within the Energy-Food-Water-Environment Nexus. New approaches to land management change are required to reduce socio-economic impacts of soil erosion but in spite of its significance, soil erosion is insufficiently understood in its social dimensions, and is almost non-governed in Latin American DAC countries. Two factors may explain this: (a) erosion is often slow and "invisible", or accepted as the norm, and (b) erosion is highly complex, emerging from interaction of socio-economic and natural processes, with interconnected feedbacks between external and internal drivers. Working in collaboration with researchers from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the Chile-UK partnership aims to develop a new integrated approach for understanding and governing soil erosion at the river basin scale. Our multidisciplinary team combines innovative scientific measuring methods and advanced Latin American approaches for socio-cultural intervention to provide a new framework within which soil erosion challenges in Latin America can be addressed.