Editorial: Enhancing soil health and climate resilience through sustainable agricultural practices

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Original abstract

Maintaining soil health is the central theme of sustainable agriculture, balancing crop productivity, environmental quality, ecosystem services, and the resilience of agricultural systems to climatic and socio-economic disturbances. Sustainable agricultural practices such as conservation agriculture, climate-smart management, biochar application, renewable energy integration, and integrated nutrient management have emerged as promising pathways for strengthening soil health and climate resilience. This research topic brings together contributions from diverse agroecosystems and regions worldwide to examine the complex interplay among soil processes, crop management, resource-use efficiency, and socio-economic factors through studies that comprehensively explore how innovative and contextspecific interventions can improve soil health dynamics, water regulation, nutrient cycling, biodiversity, and agricultural resilience while contributing to climate change mitigation and adaptation. In addition to advances in technology, the contributions offer a perspective on the relevance of a system-based approach that acknowledges the interrelationships among ecological, agronomic, economic, and sociocultural considerations for sustainability. Through comprehensive reviews and original works from several fields, the collection aims to make meaningful contributions to identifying the opportunities, challenges, and dynamics involved in a transition towards a sustainable agricultural system.The physical, chemical and biological status of soils determines their ability to control water fluxes, cycle and store nutrients and organic carbon, and support plant growth under increasing climatic and anthropogenic stress. Despite advances in crop production technologies, issues like soil degradation, organic matter depletion, and yield instability continue to threaten global food security, particularly in intensive and sensitive agroecosystems. The contributions in this topic explore interactions between conservation tillage, residue management regimes and weed management strategies in modifying soil aggregation processes, stabilising aggregate-associated C pools and increasing moisture conservation.Through this synthesis, conservation agriculture is presented as a coherent management paradigm in which the enhancement of soil health is the cumulative result of the interaction among multiple components of the practice. In a rice-based cropping system, the inclusion of a legume and conservation tillage showed potential to improve SOC, aggregate-associated C mass, and structural indices (Kundu et al., 2025). Aggregate-associated carbon, especially that occluded in macroaggregates and later converted into microaggregate domains of greater stability, is a relatively stable pool that plays a role in long-term soil carbon storage and structural stability. The dynamics of carbon under conservation agriculture are best understood within a broader set of soil health outcomes that go beyond greenhouse gas mitigation to include productivity, resource-use efficiency, and resilience. Reduced tillage alters weed seed distribution, germination cues, and weed community composition, while residue retention suppresses weeds by limiting light, moderating soil temperature, and hindering seedling emergence. 2025) highlighted improved soil health and sustainable crop productivity in a rice-maize sequence under CA practices, particularly permanent beds, along with P-enriched vermicompost mulches. Transitional phases may be associated with trade-offs, such as short-term yield variability, changes in nutrient stratification profiles, and altered pest/weed dynamics, and require careful management. Addressing these challenges requires adaptation and context-specific approaches grounded in long-term field experimentation and close interaction with local management realities.From a research perspective, further progress will depend on transitioning from single-factor to holistic assessments of soil health outcomes.Climate change is severely affecting soil systems, agricultural productivity, and rural livelihoods.Rising climate variability, soil degradation, nutrient depletion, and water stress have undermined conventional approaches that prioritize short-term yield gains. Climate-smart agriculture is therefore needed to improve soil health, sustain productivity, and reduce vulnerability. Its effectiveness depends on practicality, affordability, adoption ease, long-term retention, and alignment with local soil, livelihood, and institutional constraints.In drought-prone regions, reduced tillage, cover crops, residue retention, organic amendments, and rainwater harvesting can improve moisture retention, reduce erosion, and stabilise yields. In intensive systems, diversified cropping and biologically mediated nutrient inputs can reduce nutrient imbalance, stimulate microbial activity, and lower fertiliser dependence. In hilly landscapes, soil cover, agrobiodiversity, and nutrient cycling are central to resilience. Thus, climate-smart agriculture is an evolving set of locally adaptable practices.A study from Uganda's central cattle corridor showed that adoption and continued use are shaped by household resources, institutions, and livelihood priorities (Galiwango et al., 2025). Mulching, manure application, conservation tillage, agroforestry, and drought-adaptive cropping were retained differently across systems depending on land access, labour availability, livestock ownership, and institutional support, and were more durable when embedded within existing livelihood strategies.In eastern sub-Himalayan India, maize-pea intercropping improved land-use efficiency, nutrient uptake, productivity, soil fertility, weed suppression, and returns compared with maize monocropping (Meena et al., 2025). In Brazil, corn intercropped with cover crops and inoculated with diazotrophic bacteria improved yield, nutrient status, and nutrient-use efficiency while reducing synthetic fertiliser dependence (Nascimento et al., 2025). Such approaches strengthen nutrient cycling and biological activity while lowering input costs.In the Western Himalayas, traditional food systems based on wild plant harvesting, fermentation, agroforestry, and transhumant agriculture maintained soil organic matter, supported agrobiodiversity, nutrient cycling, and food security (Sharma et al., 2026). Their persistence reflected ecological suitability, social norms, policy incentives, gendered labour, and inter-generational knowledge transfer.Long-term adoption, therefore, requires alignment among soil health goals, farmer livelihoods, local knowledge, institutions, and socio-economic equity. Resource-rich households are better positioned to retain such practices, while resource-constrained farmers may face barriers even when long-term benefits are clear (Galiwango et al., 2025).Renewable energy integration, soil amendments, conservation agriculture, diversified cropping, and biologically mediated nutrient inputs are emerging as pathways for maintaining soil function while reducing climate impacts. Biochar connects waste valorisation with soil fertility improvement and carbon stabilisation. Its effects depend on feedstock, production conditions, particle size, and application rate, which influence surface chemistry, porosity, sorption, and microbial interactions, making its performance context-specific (Siddiqui, 2025). As biochar is increasingly promoted for carbon accounting and climate mitigation, field-scale evaluation is needed to avoid overstating benefits where returns are uncertain.Conservation agriculture provides another route for improving soil function. In rice-maize systems of the Indo-Gangetic Plains, reduced tillage, permanent raised beds, and residue retention improved soil organic matter, water-holding capacity, and microbial biomass, indicating better aggregation, structure, and biological activity under climate stress (Sahoo et al., 2025). However, outcomes depended on residue and weed management. Legume integration in maize-based intercropping enhanced nutrient uptake, land-use efficiency, and productivity stability (Meena et al., 2025), while cover crops inoculated with diazotrophic bacteria improved corn yield and leaf nutrient status in Brazil (Nascimento et al., 2025).Renewable energy infrastructure adds another dimension to soil and land management. Solar installations often compete with agriculture because of land conversion, compaction, and disturbance concerns. However, sheep grazing beneath and between solar photovoltaic panels in the northeastern United States increased soil organic matter and forage quality, reflecting manure inputs and reduced disturbance and suggesting that solar infrastructure can support soil health when paired with vegetation management (Andrew et al., 2025).The articles in this collection have a very clear message: sustainable change in agriculture requires more than technologies and ecological fixes that can be educated in isolation. Resilience in agro-ecosystems is manifested through the interactions among soil processes, water processes, nutrient cycling and human decisions within a specific social and environmental context. Across the studies, soil carbon restoration, water-buffering ability, and nutrient use efficiency are considered related outcomes rather than separate objectives. These outcomes result from management practices, institutional arrangements and agronomic programming choices made by farmers and other stakeholders under a variety of constrained circumstances. The synergy between skills and digital tools can enhance the penetration of CA technologies, which further highlights that the adoption and maintenance of sustainable practices are largely mediated by socio-economic enablers (Ding et al., 2025). Management decisions depend on variables such as the size of the farm, the accessibility of resources, the availability of labour, integration with the market and perceived risk. Even with some bright, obvious ecological features, there is not much connectivity without the context of institutional issues and economics. Socio-economic modelling has been found to be a useful tool for anticipating adoption trajectories and trade-offs. When combined with biophysical assessments, such models can represent the feedback between management decisions, environmental outcomes and economic viability. The Special issue as a whole emphasises the need to study these issues through interdisciplinary approaches across the fields of agronomy, economics and the social sciences. A consistent limitation found in the reviewed literature is the lack of long on-farm data that encapsulates real-life variability. While controlled experiments provide mechanistic understanding, their use is limited for scenario analysis of spatial heterogeneity and management diversity. The contributions show the possibilities and usefulness of participatory experimentation as a bridge between innovation and adoption, particularly in heterogeneous agroecological regions. Digital technologies, decision support systems, remote sensing, and data-based monitoring platforms can enhance the effectiveness and precision of management, as well as the speed with which it can respond to problems and implement countermeasures. This collection also considers the importance of accounting for region-specific developmental pathways in adaptation within climate-smart agricultural frameworks. Several contributions suggest that effective integration can best be achieved through the coherent alignment of sustainability goals, enabled by appropriate policy frameworks. Collectively, the contributions published in this special issue highlight that sustainable agricultural transitions occur through interactions among ecological functions, technical tools and human decision-making processes.This collection re-emphasises that improving soil health forms an essential part of creating climateresilient and sustainable agricultural systems. In different agroecological contexts, approaches to soil improvement have been found quite useful, offering not only biophysical advantages but also economic viability and integrating well with existing knowledge structures and institutions. It becomes clear that soil health, climate resilience, and agricultural productivity are the by-products of integrated system management rather than standalone goals. In the coming years, a holistic approach involving both research and policy formulation that considers all aspects of soil-crop-climate-human interactions will be required. Policy formulation must also incorporate mechanisms to promote locally tailored solutions for adaptive management. The information shared in this collection can serve as an excellent starting point for research and decision-making on management practices for agricultural sustainability in the years to come.

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