The study arrives at a politically charged moment. The European Union’s Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe” explicitly calls for new business models that support soil health, and regulators across the world are experimenting with carbon credits, biodiversity credits, and sustainability reporting rules that push companies to pay for ecological outcomes. Business models, in the widely used definition of Osterwalder and Pigneur, describe how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value. If policymakers want to incentivize land managers, the authors contend, they first need to understand precisely which types of value soil health investments produce, and who stands to benefit from them.

To build that understanding, Mathijs and Van Ruymbeke borrow the Total Economic Value framework from neoclassical environmental economics, refining it with the work of scholars such as Bartkowski, Davidson, and Pascual. The framework distinguishes output value, the aggregate worth of ecosystem services delivered by a system in a given state, from insurance value, the system’s capacity to keep delivering those services under disturbance and uncertainty. Output values split further into use values, covering consumptive goods like food and non-consumptive benefits like recreation, and non-use values, such as existence value and bequest value, the satisfaction people derive simply from knowing soil ecosystems persist for others and for future generations. The authors are careful to position the framework as a structured policy vocabulary rather than a neutral or exhaustive theory, noting that it must be complemented where labour, rights, power, and values that resist monetization are concerned.

From this foundation the researchers derive six complementary perspectives on soil-health-based business models. The productivist perspective treats soil as a form of capital whose improvement raises yields, cuts input costs, and increases land value, giving land managers an intrinsic motivation to invest. The ecosystem services perspective widens the lens to regulating and cultural services that benefit society at large, which can be monetized through compensation mechanisms provided that willing payers exist. The resilience perspective corresponds to insurance value: healthy soil reduces the likelihood or severity of adverse outcomes for farmers, lenders, insurers, and food processors alike, and the authors retain it as a separate category to make accounting, discounting, and long-term stewardship visible as policy concerns.

The remaining three perspectives push beyond conventional market logic. The non-use value perspective captures the benefit people obtain from the mere existence and preservation of soil ecosystems, including value for future generations, and therefore demands a commitment to benefits that may never be visibly realized. The intrinsic value perspective goes further still, asserting that soil possesses worth independent of any human preference, a view rooted in ecocentric and value-pluralist worldviews that echo the land ethic of Aldo Leopold and the agrarian essays of Wendell Berry. Finally, the social perspective, an addition not found in the original Total Economic Value framework, recognizes that soil health is a socially co-constructed concept: soil values are co-produced through natural properties, human labour, management history, and institutions, all shaped by power relations including unequal ownership and historical dispossession. This perspective emphasizes inclusive governance, community agency, and fair access to soil-related benefits.

Together, the six perspectives give economic content to the capital dimension of the broader soil security framework, which also includes capability, connectivity, and codification. Soil health investments, in this reading, are best understood as maintaining or appreciating a natural asset rather than merely boosting short-term productivity. The framework can help policymakers and financial institutions identify beneficiaries, construct credible investment cases, and design safeguards, supporting loans, guarantees, insurance arrangements, and payments for ecosystem services without assuming that every component of soil value must be monetized or collapsed into a single figure. Spatially explicit indicators can partly operationalize the idea: recent Australian research has combined soil functions, services, and threats to estimate soil management capital per hectare, and comparisons between managed phenosoils and least-modified genosoil references can reveal degradation or improvement over time. Measures such as pH-regulation costs, nutrient stocks, and available water capacity can guide targeting, though the authors stress these methods cannot capture every value perspective and should complement, not replace, plural indicators and public deliberation.

Each perspective also implies distinct policy tools and distinct failure modes. Under the productivist view, incentives should in principle be unnecessary if income gains cover the investment, but three problems commonly arise. Returns may be delayed, as in the transition to organic farming, justifying temporary subsidies whose level and duration are context-specific. Returns may be too small to cover the investment, requiring permanent additional income streams or investment subsidies. Or land users may lack the equity or credit access to invest at all, a case where government guarantees can lower lenders’ risk. The ecosystem services perspective, by contrast, relies on payments and markets such as the EU Emissions Trading System and the emerging biodiversity credit market, reinforced by mandatory rules like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Here the authors flag three complications: interventions may not consistently deliver the expected services, which argues for hybrid schemes blending practice-based and performance-based payments; services are often co-produced, making individual contributions hard to isolate; and credits frequently fail to reflect true opportunity costs, since a one-off carbon payment does not cover the ongoing investment needed to maintain soil carbon, whose marginal gains also decline over time.

The resilience perspective exposes a classic coordination failure. Because every actor benefiting from reduced risk might be willing to pay a premium, uncoordinated action invites free-riding, over-subsidization, or under-subsidization, and unlike discrete ecosystem services, risk cannot be decomposed among beneficiaries. There can also be a direct trade-off between income and resilience, as when crop diversification forces less profitable rotations that buyers, who typically purchase only a single crop, are reluctant to support with broader contracts. The non-use and intrinsic value perspectives, lacking conventional market returns, instead call for public expenditure, intergenerational protection, legal minimum standards such as the EU Soil Monitoring Law, and cultural and educational programmes that revitalize land-based knowledge and sustain an ethic of care. The social perspective demands relational and institutional incentives: peer-exchange platforms such as EIP-Agri, adaptive policy frameworks, grants for community projects, open-access knowledge tools, and participatory research funding, alongside attention to tenure security, bargaining power, transaction costs, and benefit sharing, particularly where external investors might shift control away from local actors.

The article’s central message is deliberately uncomfortable for policymakers seeking a silver bullet: no single instrument can serve all six perspectives effectively. Soil health is shaped by multiple, overlapping values that rarely occur in isolation, and different actors may hold diverse or simultaneous values at once. Effective governance therefore requires a flexible, differentiated strategy that supports land managers with targeted, easily adoptable measures integrated into their business models, while guarding against over-subsidization and free-riding where benefits are non-excludable, and ensuring coordination, accountability, distributional safeguards, and adaptive learning. The authors also warn of the risks of tokenism and co-optation, in which community-led soil initiatives are superficially adopted without genuinely empowering communities, and note that scaling social innovations beyond pilot contexts remains a persistent challenge. By clarifying how soil as a stock can generate different flows of value, and how management can make that stock appreciate or depreciate, the framework offers decision makers a foundation for designing inclusive and adaptive policies, one that adds economic substance to soil security while preventing capital valuation from becoming the sole account of what soils are and why they matter.

Subject of Research: Value-based frameworks for soil health business models and soil policy design

Article Title: Soil health-based business models: perspectives and policy implications

Article References: Mathijs, E., & Van Ruymbeke, K. (2026). Soil health-based business models: perspectives and policy implications. SOIL, 12(2), 835-840. https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-12-835-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/soil-12-835-2026

Keywords: soil health, soil security, business models, ecosystem services, total economic value, soil policy, resilience, carbon credits, biodiversity credits, EU Soil Deal for Europe, natural capital, social innovation

Understanding soil’s function demands an exploration of its complex interactions with water, involving processes such as filtration, adsorption, degradation, and transformation of pollutants. Soils act as natural filters, preventing the ingress of hazardous substances into groundwater and surface water bodies. However, this capability is finite and highly dependent on soil health parameters including organic matter content, microbial diversity, texture, and structure. The degradation of these soil attributes through pollution, compaction, or improper management significantly undermines its filtering capacity, thereby exposing water resources to contamination risks.

One of the paramount challenges in contemporary soil-water dynamics is the presence and mobility of micropollutants—trace organic and inorganic compounds originating from a variety of sources. Traditionally, pesticides have been the focal point of contamination concerns owing to their widespread agricultural use and documented toxicological effects. Nonetheless, the spectrum of micropollutants has expanded dramatically to include pharmaceuticals, personal care products, industrial chemicals, and microplastics. These emerging contaminants often possess complex physicochemical properties that complicate their behavior in soil matrices and subsequent transport into aquatic environments.

The application of reclaimed materials, such as biosolids, treated wastewater, and organic waste, exemplifies a resource reuse strategy that simultaneously benefits soil fertility and challenges soil-water quality frameworks. While recycling these materials contributes to circular economy goals and reduces landfill pressures, it inadvertently introduces novel micropollutants into soils that may persist, bioaccumulate, or transform into even more harmful derivatives. Consequently, the practice demands rigorous evaluation and monitoring protocols to prevent inadvertent dissemination of contaminants through soil pathways into water bodies.

Pharmaceutical residues in soils represent a particularly insidious class of pollutants. Their biological activity, designed to exert effects at very low concentrations, poses potential threats beyond target organisms. Upon entering soils via effluents or land-applied amendments, these compounds can alter microbial communities critical for nutrient cycling and organic matter decomposition, thereby impairing soil functions. Moreover, the fate of these pharmaceuticals in soil and their capacity to leach into groundwater depend on complex interactions influenced by soil pH, organic carbon content, and microbial enzymatic activity.

Microplastics, an increasingly recognized environmental hazard, infiltrate soils through diverse routes including sludge amendments, atmospheric deposition, and irrigation with contaminated water. Their persistence and physical characteristics affect soil porosity, water retention, and microbial habitat quality. Furthermore, microplastics serve as vectors for co-contaminants, enhancing the mobility of hydrophobic pollutants and potentially facilitating their transfer to aquatic systems. The cumulative impacts of microplastics and their associated chemicals on soil and water quality remain an evolving field of inquiry demanding urgent attention.

The duality of soil as both a reservoir and a conduit for contaminants underscores the critical need for integrated management approaches. Soil’s capacity to immobilize or degrade pollutants must be viewed in context with land use practices, climatic variables, and anthropogenic pressures that influence contaminant inputs and transformation. A systems-level understanding, incorporating ecological, chemical, and hydrological perspectives, is essential to develop effective strategies that preserve both soil integrity and water purity.

Future policy frameworks must embrace the “One Environment” ethos that transcends traditional silos separating soil, water, and atmospheric management. This holistic view aligns with the broader “One Health” concept recognizing interconnectedness across human, animal, and environmental health. Policies should incentivize sustainable land management practices, promote development of advanced monitoring technologies, and support research into novel remediation techniques tailored for emerging micropollutants.

The advent of advanced analytical methodologies, such as high-resolution mass spectrometry and molecular biology tools, has revolutionized the detection and characterization of micropollutants in soil-water systems. These technologies unveil the complexity of contaminant mixtures and allow tracing of their transformation products, shedding light on previously hidden exposure pathways. Combining these insights with big data analytics and predictive modeling can inform risk assessments and guide adaptive management interventions.

Agricultural landscapes, which dominate many watersheds globally, are arenas where soil-water health challenges converge dramatically. Inputs including fertilizers, pesticides, and organic amendments impact soil microbial dynamics and contaminant flux, influencing groundwater recharge and surface runoff quality. Integrating precision agriculture techniques with soil health monitoring offers prospects to optimize input use, minimize environmental footprints, and enhance resilience of agroecosystems.

Climate change further complicates soil-water interactions by altering precipitation patterns, temperature regimes, and extreme event frequencies. Such shifts influence contaminant mobilization, transform microbial community structure, and modify soil physicochemical properties. Adaptive strategies must therefore accommodate these dynamic conditions to sustainably manage soil and water quality amid growing environmental volatility.

Collaborative multidisciplinary research efforts are crucial to decipher complex soil-water-contaminant interrelations. Engaging soil scientists, hydrologists, chemists, ecologists, economists, and policymakers fosters comprehensive solutions grounded in ecological principles and socio-economic realities. This integrative approach can propel innovations in sustainable soil management technologies and pollution mitigation practices.

The imperative to sustain healthy soils as guardians of water quality resonates profoundly in the context of global sustainability agendas, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Clean water (SDG 6) and life on land (SDG 15) are intimately entwined, with soil health underpinning resource security, biodiversity conservation, and climate resilience. Recognizing these connections catalyzes transformative paradigms in environmental governance and resource stewardship.

In conclusion, the fundamental role of healthy soil in maintaining water quality demands urgent scientific, technological, and policy attention. By harnessing soil’s natural capacity for contaminant attenuation and adopting integrated management frameworks, societies can simultaneously safeguard water resources and promote sustainable development. This transformative vision requires a concerted commitment to interdisciplinary knowledge generation, innovative solutions, and inclusive policy design aligned under a unified One Environment-One Health strategy. The future of global environmental health hinges on our ability to nurture the soils beneath our feet as vital protectors of water and life itself.

Subject of Research: The integrated role of healthy soil systems in preserving and enhancing water quality through the attenuation of micropollutants and sustainable resource reuse practices.

Article Title: The fundamental role of healthy soil in maintaining water quality.

Article References:
Kah, M., Wilson, S.C. & Carter, L. The fundamental role of healthy soil in maintaining water quality. Nat Water (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-025-00553-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-025-00553-1