RECOGNISING the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development which aims to eliminate poverty and hunger for all human beings and RECALLING that many Sustainable Development Goals support the Agenda, in particular Goals 2, 12 and 15 which call for zero hunger, responsible consumption, and life on land respectively;

RECOGNISING the growing global concerns over the role of unsustainable agriculture practices in transcending three major planetary boundaries (biosphere integrity, land-system change and biogeochemical flows);

AWARE that food insecurity is on the rise at global level, with more than 820 million people suffering from hunger and that global demand for food continues to grow;

NOTING that agricultural land can provide a number of ecosystem services when managed sustainably and that farmers and landowners can be incentivised to conserve those services;

RECOGNISING that the full value of agricultural land and landscapes depends especially on restoring and protecting land health, for which soil organic carbon and soil biodiversity are key indicators;

NOTING the call for transformation of the food and agriculture system in the Hawai‘i Commitments, as well as IUCN’s history of Resolutions and Recommendations that relate to food and agriculture, and also the work of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) and the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) on nutrition and Food systems;

MINDFUL OF the major contribution of unsustainable agricultural practices to environmental degradation and the extinction crisis;

MINDFUL, conversely, that well-managed agricultural practices and sustainable agricultural and forest systems can provide important conservation and social benefits and are vital tools for the restoration of degraded lands;

NOTING that 40% of agricultural land is degraded or degrading and this presents both a risk and an opportunity;

ALSO RECOGNISING the centrality of land health and soil biodiversity to maintaining ecosystem functionality in production landscapes;

ACKNOWLEDGING the significant knowledge gaps in the taxonomy and characterisation of soil biodiversity;

EMPHASISING the need to manage soil as an ecosystem and not as a substrate and that this knowledge is already embedded in many traditional and contemporary land management systems;

ACKNOWLEDGING that increased multi-stakeholder dialogue and engagement is required if the world is to achieve a sustainable food and agriculture system;

RECOGNISING the growing number of actors in the agriculture sector that are striving for sectoral transformation towards sustainability; and

NOTING IUCN’s growing role in promoting sustainable land management as an accredited agency of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the opportunity for promoting sustainable land management as a Nature-based Solution for sustainable agriculture and food production;