Two decades of FAO/IAEA supported research and development for combating soil degradation through isotopes

This feature article is a short summary of the paper written within the IAEA CRP D1.50.17 on "Nuclear techniques for a better understanding of the impact of climate change on soil erosion in upland agro-ecosystems" and published with open-access in September 2018 in the Land Degradation & Development peer-reviewed journal (Mabit et al. 2018). It provides an overview and emphasizes the major achievements of IAEA and its external collaborators in the development of fallout radionuclides (FRN) and Compound Specific Stable Isotope (CSSI) techniques over the last two decades and it reports also the key findings of the recently running CRP D1.50.17. In addition, the last section of the paper (Mabit et al., 2018) presents benefits gained by IAEA Member States and FAO Member Countries through dissemination of the CRP's results by related Technical Cooperation projects (TCPs). Successful examples of the impact obtained in Morocco, Madagascar and Vietnam in using FRN and CSSI techniques have been highlighted. The Soil and Water Management and Crop Nutrition (SWMCN) Subprogramme has made significant contributions to the development and refinement of cost-effective isotopic techniques to localise degraded agricultural areas, to evaluate soil redistribution magnitudes from field to watershed scales, to assess the effectiveness of soil conservation strategies and, more recently, to establish the origin of the mobilised and deposited sediment.