Organic Carbon Management and the Relations with Climate Change

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays a key role in global warming mitigation. The type of SOC and the decomposition rate determine the organic matter storage in the soils. The environmental conditions, soil properties and land use and management are the main factors determining the ability of soil to store carbon. However, there are no common rules that can be applied for all the conditions, and it is important to understand the local and regional environmental processes to achieve the better strategy to increase SOC. Moreover, it is important to improve the methods to easily know the type of organic carbon stored and determine if SOC is increased by the increment of the stabilised and long-time resistant organic matter. More research is needed if we want to stablish a common framework of actions that can be used under different situations to reduce greenhouse emissions from agriculture and ensure the sequestration and storage of carbon in soils. Even more, all would be under a general SOC methodology to estimate the carbon content and their resilience to changes. The only generalization that can be made is that farm soils have lower SOC levels than soils with natural vegetation under similar environmental factors and this is the key to look for new strategies to combat climate change.