Nutrient Cycling and Climate Change

Climate change and global warming are the major challenges in the agriculture sector for nutrient use efficiency, sustainability of natural resources, and food security. Sustainability of soil resources for food security in the era of climate change usually revolves around soil carbon and its possible sequestration in more stabilized forms. Carbon sequestration in soil is a widely studied approach to mitigate climate change, and global warming since soil carbon and its stock is highly vulnerable to the changing climate. It is known that carbon cycling and transformation affects directly or indirectly the transformation and cycling of nutrients in soil. Understanding the processes and mechanisms of nutrient cycling and transformations as affected by climate change is of utmost importance as far as nutrient use efficiency and appropriate management strategies are concerned. Evidence of alterations in nutrient transformation and cycling due to the changes in climatic variables has been well documented. Nevertheless, research efforts are lacking in addressing the effect of climate change on the availability of nutrients, the transformation, and cycling of which are not directly associated with carbon cycling in soil. This chapter aims at highlighting the impact of climate change on the cycling and transformations of important plant nutrient elements and the future prospects in climate change research pertaining to nutrient transformation and availability in soil.