RECSOIL Initiative - Recarbonization of Global Agricultural Soils
Background
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO)’s Global Soil Partnership (GSP) launched the Recarbonisation of Global Agricultural Soil (RECSOIL) initiative in 2020 as a mechanism for scaling up sustainable soil management (SSM) with a focus on increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) for the improvement of overall soil health and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from soils, providing a pathway for climate change mitigation and adaptation. The priorities are to prevent future SOC losses and increases SOC stocks, increase resilience of agrifood systems, improve farmers’ incomes and contribute to food security. RECSOIL focuses on agricultural and degraded soils. The mechanism supports the provision of incentives for farmers who agree to implement good practices and the furnishing of practical tools for selecting, implementing, and monitoring SSM practices.
RECSOIL is designed to unlock the potential of SOC, enhancing soil health and delivering multiple benefits through essential ecosystem services. Healthy agricultural soils directly contribute to improved food security, increased farm income, poverty reduction, and the alleviation of malnutrition. It also plays a pivotal role in providing crucial ecosystem services, such as filtering pollutants, increasing water retention and drought resilience, enhancing soil biodiversity and mitigating and adapting to climate change, and strengthening enhancing farm-level resilience against extreme climatic events and pandemics.
Covered in more detail below, RECSOIL provides tools and strategies to support progress towards Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). Considering that 46% of parties include carbon sequestration in agriculture as a high-potential mitigation option in their NDCs, RECSOIL protocols provide a direct and concrete pathway to both implement strategies that sequester carbon and tools to quantify those soil carbon increases. Additionally, the strategies necessary to increase soil carbon also lead to increased agricultural resilience, contributing to NAPs.
RECSOIL fills a gap for low-cost tools for the selection, monitoring and extension of SSM practices. Typically, locally relevant SSM practice recommendations are only available through costly soil testing on individual farms and regular involvement with extension agents, who are often inaccessible to farmers. RECSOIL offers tools for designing targeted soil sampling plans that provide data according to soil type, land use, and other environmental factors, so that practices may be developed for similar areas then scaled to surrounding farms. Additionally, in the absence of regular access to laboratory testing, RECSOIL’s Visual Soil Assessment (VSA) provides farmers with low-cost methods to evaluate the impact of the selected practices on soil quality. Effective practices are then transferred to farmers in the surrounding areas through farmer-to-farmer training programmes.
By decreasing the costs required to create tailored SSM practice recommendations, setting up farmer-to-farmer extension networks, and providing low-cost SSM practice monitoring tools, RECSOIL provides an accessible pathway for mitigation and adaptation to climate change through SSM.
Activities
Led by FAO, the RECSOIL initiative is a multi-stakeholder effort aimed at restoring soil health and enhancing carbon sequestration through sustainable soil management. RECSOIL’s interventions span training, technical capacity building, soil monitoring system development, and cooperative engagement. It brings together government representatives, soil scientists, agronomists, field technicians, farmer associations, and individual farmers to jointly identify priorities and implement targeted interventions across diverse agricultural landscapes.
The initiative unfolds over seven structured phases across four years, with flexibility for extended monitoring. It begins with a diagnostic phase, where geospatial tools—such as the Global Soil Organic Carbon Sequestration Potential Map—help identify high-impact areas, including croplands, rangelands, and agroforestry systems. These “hotspots” are selected based on their potential to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks.
Once priority areas are identified, FAO coordinates with national institutions, farmer cooperatives, and soil laboratories to establish formal agreements and launch the project. This is followed by capacity building, where technical experts are trained in harmonized soil sampling and monitoring protocols, and farmers learn visual soil assessment techniques and SSM practices. These trainings empower farmers to become local champions of soil health.
A tailored soil monitoring plan is then developed, incorporating local conditions and stakeholder input. This leads to a baseline assessment, which includes soil sampling, SOC stock estimation, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions analysis, and documentation of farming practices.
The heart of the initiative lies in the implementation phase, where SSM practices are selected collaboratively and put into action. Farmers receive training and inputs, and annual assessments are conducted to evaluate progress. Feedback loops, such as farmer workshops, ensure that practices remain relevant and effective.
Finally, the project concludes with a comprehensive evaluation, including follow-up soil sampling and GHG estimations. A continuity plan is developed to sustain and scale up successful practices, ensuring long-term impact beyond the project’s lifespan. In parallel, FAO works closely with governments to strengthen soil-related policies and incentive schemes, ensuring the long-term sustainability of RECSOIL and aligning it with national regulations and financial mechanisms. This institutional support helps embed SSM practices into broader agricultural and environmental strategies.
Impact
RECSOIL offers countries a comprehensive and science-based toolkit to monitor the impact of sustainable soil management (SSM) practices on both climate mitigation and agricultural resilience. Through the use of the GSOC-MRV Protocol, a globally harmonized system for measuring, monitoring, reporting, and verifying soil organic carbon (SOC) in agricultural soils, and the Environmental eXternalities Accounting Tool (EX-ACT) for estimating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, RECSOIL enables precise tracking of SOC increases and GHG reductions. This is particularly relevant given that 46% of countries explicitly include agricultural carbon sequestration as a high-potential mitigation strategy in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). In this context, RECSOIL becomes a powerful mechanism for supporting national targets under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Beyond climate goals, RECSOIL contributes directly to the development and implementation of National Action Plans (NAPs) by reinforcing the land-soil-water nexus—a critical intersection for ensuring food security and ecosystem services. Using RECSOIL’s soil assessment and monitoring tools, countries can design and implement locally adapted SSM practices at low cost. These practices are continuously monitored to ensure they improve farmer livelihoods, increase yields, and enhance soil health. Knowledge is shared through farmer-to-farmer training, allowing successful practices to be scaled across neighboring farms and communities.
FAO also works in parallel with national governments to strengthen soil-related policies and incentive schemes, ensuring the long-term sustainability of RECSOIL and its alignment with national regulations and financial mechanisms. This institutional integration helps embed SSM practices into broader agricultural and environmental strategies, creating enabling environments for lasting impact.
RECSOIL’s contribution to biodiversity is equally significant. Healthy soils are essential for thriving ecosystems, and restoring soil health directly supports Target 11 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which focuses on maintaining and enhancing ecosystem services. While measuring soil biodiversity remains complex, SOC is widely used as a proxy for microbial diversity. Through RECSOIL, FAO is equipping countries to monitor additional biological indicators, offering a clearer picture of progress toward the conservation and sustainable use of soil biodiversity.
Moreover, RECSOIL promotes biodiversity-friendly practices, such as the use of compost and biofertilizers, which harness the potential of local soil biodiversity to improve productivity and resilience. All recommended SSM practices are validated for specific soil types, land uses, and environmental conditions, and can be scaled using low-cost extension and monitoring tools. These protocols can also be integrated into national ecosystem service payment schemes, further incentivizing sustainable practices.