Traditional Land Use Systems Potential as the Framework for Soil Organic Carbon Plans and Policies

Carbon’s regulatory role in life dynamics has been acknowledged over the past 20 years all over the world. Humans, on the other hand, have known for thousands of years, albeit not conceptually, the impact of carbon in life on the quality of the soil necessary for the production of food, clothing, and shelter materials, and have attempted to maintain their land fertile, whether via beneficial or harmful management. While some societies burned trees to create more fertile agricultural fields, others built stone terraces to keep the soil from being washed away by erosion. Civilizations have collapsed as well, such as Mesopotamia, due to poor irrigation practices accelerated by climatic changes. Countries had to take action against accelerated land degradation, loss of biodiversity, and desertification, as well as climate change, in the past five decades, with a deeper context, after the 1970s, due to excessive natural resource exploitation in the nineteenth century. As a result, they have developed international and national policies to seek to prevent and eliminate these threats. Countries prioritized adaptation and mitigation activities since prevention efforts on these problems did not generate sufficient benefits. Unfortunately, the traditional wisdom of society and today’s socioeconomic reality cannot be claimed to be taken into consideration when adopting these procedures. While many national activity plans involve the transition to agro-ecological agriculture in a region, the budget and training that will be provided for this are not well defined. These programs are frequently ineffectual, as demonstrated by the fact that almost 1 billion people are starving and 25% of the world’s land has been degraded. It is widely acknowledged that organic carbon must be managed effectively in attempt to face the global threats of climate change, land degradation, and biodiversity loss, and in this study, traditional knowledge and current policies were reviewed on a global scale as much as possible, with compatibilities and contradictions tried to be revealed. The intention is that traditional knowledge, which has accumulated and proven itself over thousands of years by overcoming challenges, will take an active role in national and international policies.