Leveraging drought risk reduction for sustainable food, soil and climate via soil organic carbon sequestration

Drought is a major risk in global agriculture. Building-up soil organic carbon (SOC) enhances soil fertility and efficient use of rainwater, which can increase drought tolerance in food production. SOC management demonstrates its benefit at various locations and is a promising means to achieve food security and climate mitigation at once. However, no global assessment of its potential and co-benefits gained from SOC enhancement has been presented. Here we evaluated the extent to which SOC build-up could reduce agricultural drought risk. Using statistical analysis of spatially-explicit global crop and soil datasets, we find that relatively small enhancement in topsoil (0–30 cm) organic carbon content (OCtop) could increase drought tolerance of the food production systems operating over 70% of the global harvested area (particularly drylands). By closing the gap between current and upper limit of tolerance levels through SOC addition of 4.87 GtC at the global scale, farmer’s economic output in drought years would increase by ~16%. This level of SOC increase has co-benefit of reducing global decadal mean temperature warming by 0.011 °C. Our findings highlight that progress towards multiple development goals can be leveraged by SOC enhancement in carbon (C)-poor soils in drier regions around the world.