A fast pacing climate change exacerbates the multitude of human impacts. Several reports highlighted (e.g., Magurran, 2016; Lewis et al., 2017; Diffenbaugh et al., 2018) that the degree of impact imposed by human activities on all the ecosystem components are unprecedented. We entered a new era, the Anthropocene (Malhi, 2017; Laurence, 2019). In this new era, soil and water resources are exposed to tremendous pressure, and our life depends on it.
Soils and water environments (e.g., freshwater, coastal and marine) provide a wide range of direct and indirect regulating (e.g., carbon sequestration, climate regulation, water purification and storage, flood retention), provisioning (e.g., food, fiber, wood), and cultural (e.g., education, recreation, landscape aesthetics) ecosystem services (ES). Therefore, both soils and water are the key elements to humankind (Barbier, 2017; Pereira et al., 2018; Jorda-Capdevila et al., 2019). Soils and water environments interact in a continuum through very complex processes and feedbacks. For example, agriculture practices have implications on land degradation, water bodies eutrophication and pollution.
Here, we present numerous studies focusing on how land abandonment (Tarolli et al., 2019), urbanization (Ferreira et al., 2018), agriculture intensification (Panagos et al., 2016), mining (Zibret et al., 2018), warfare activities in relation to land degradation (Certini et al., 2013) and climate change (Plaza et al., 2019) are accelerating soil and water resources degradation, and reducing their capacity to provide ES in quality and quantity. These drivers of change either interact individually or coupled at different spatio-temporal scales
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120303947
