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Soil is central to the complex interplay among biodiversity, climate, and society. This paper examines the interconnectedness of soil biodiversity, climate change, and societal impacts, emphasizing the urgent need for integrated solutions. Human-induced biodiversity loss and climate change intensify environmental degradation, threatening human well-being. Soils, rich in biodiversity and vital for ecosystem function regulation, are highly vulnerable to these pressures, affecting nutrient cycling, soil fertility, and resilience. Soil also crucially regulates climate, influencing energy, water cycles, and carbon storage. Yet, climate change poses significant challenges to soil health and carbon dynamics, amplifying global warming. Integrated approaches are essential, including sustainable land management, policy interventions, technological innovations, and societal engagement. Practices like agroforestry and organic farming improve soil health and mitigate climate impacts. Effective policies and governance are crucial for promoting sustainable practices and soil conservation. Recent technologies aid in monitoring soil biodiversity and implementing sustainable land management. Societal engagement, through education and collective action, is vital for environmental stewardship. By prioritizing interdisciplinary research and addressing key frontiers, scientists can advance understanding of the soil biodiversity–climate change–society nexus, informing strategies for environmental sustainability and social equity.

An increasing number of publications focus on social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation (SVRA) towards natural hazards and climate change. Despite this proliferation of research, a systematic understanding of how these studies are theoretically grounded is lacking. Here, we systematically reviewed 4432 articles that address SVRA in various disciplinary fields (e.g. psychology, sociology, geography, mathematics) for various hazards, including floods, droughts, landslides, storm surges, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcano eruptions. We focus on the extent to which these studies explicate the frameworks, theoretical constructs or theories they rely on. Surprisingly, we found that about 90% of the reviewed studies do not explicitly refer to a theoretical un-derpinning. Overall, theories focusing on individuals' SVRA were more frequently used than those focusing on systems, society, groups, and networks. Moreover, the uptake of theories varied according to the hazard investigated and field of knowledge, being more frequent in wildfire and flood studies and articles published in social science journals. Based on our analysis, we propose a reflexive handling of theories to foster more transparent, comparable, and robust empirical research on SVRA.

An increasing number of publications focus on social vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation (SVRA) towards natural hazards and climate change. Despite this proliferation of research, a systematic understanding of how these studies are theoretically grounded is lacking. Here, we systematically reviewed 4432 articles that address SVRA in various disciplinary fields (e.g. psychology, sociology, geography, mathematics) for various hazards, including floods, droughts, landslides, storm surges, wildfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcano eruptions. We focus on the extent to which these studies explicate the frameworks, theoretical constructs or theories they rely on. Surprisingly, we found that about 90% of the reviewed studies do not explicitly refer to a theoretical un-derpinning. Overall, theories focusing on individuals' SVRA were more frequently used than those focusing on systems, society, groups, and networks. Moreover, the uptake of theories varied according to the hazard investigated and field of knowledge, being more frequent in wildfire and flood studies and articles published in social science journals. Based on our analysis, we propose a reflexive handling of theories to foster more transparent, comparable, and robust empirical research on SVRA.

CONTEXTFarm typologies help to identify patterns across a wide range of farm systems and describe heterogeneity in agriculture concisely. They can also support the design of agricultural policies by providing information and knowledge about policy target groups. For example, voluntary agri-environmental schemes could be tailored to specific agricultural landscapes and farm types. Farm typologies, however, are often developed from scratch, with limited connection to previous studies and policy making.OBJECTIVEThe objective of this study is to clarify the purposes of farm typologies in research and agricultural policy making and to develop a framework that allows to increase the usefulness and usability of farm typologies for agricultural policy making.METHODSBased on a review of 13 systematically identified overview studies on farm typologies, we develop a framework that establishes connections between the purposes of farm typologies along the different stages of the policy process.RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONSWe find multiple purposes for farm typologies, the two most common of which are for understanding the characteristics, heterogeneity, and development of farm systems and for policy making. The newly developed framework suggests that connecting knowledge across these purposes could improve the validity, transferability, and relevance of farm typologies for agricultural policy making. Our framework also provides an entry point for encouraging cooperation between developers and users of typologies, and for the improvement of typologies through new data (including behavioural data) and methods such as machine learning. We conclude that future research can build on the existing work on farm typologies but must be aware of the specific challenges that are associated with the use of farm typologies in the policy process.SIGNIFICANCEKnowledge of the prospects and challenges of using farm typologies allows to increase the usefulness and usabilityof these typologies and can co

Shifting agriculture onto a more sustainable trajectory requires significant changes in farmer behaviour in terms of implementing agri-environmental practices. Understanding the underlying factors influencing farmers' behaviour can provide guidance when it comes to targeting agricultural policies and ensuring that they are effective. This study builds on the 14 domains of the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) to explore farmers' support needs for adopting agri-environmental practices. TDF ratings from 29 interviews with German farmers reveal the importance of the TDF domains for three agri-environmental practices, namely agroforestry, biological pest control and controlled release fertilization. Farmers state support needs for all TDF domains, but the ratings reveal significant differences in support needs across the TDF domains as well as among the practices. Higher overall support needs for agroforestry and biological pest control compared to those for sustainable fertilization practices may reflect the additional challenges associated with more systemic shifts in farming practices. Applying the TDF to the agricultural context can be helpful for developing targeted and theoretically informed policy interventions.

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In Europe and elsewhere, agri-environmental schemes (AES) are designed to reduce agriculture's impacts on the environment. Designing effective schemes requires an understanding of the reasons that drive farmers' decisions whether to adopt AES.Currently, most insights come from individual case studies or structured surveys based on predefined questions. There is a paucity of studies that do not rely on rigid preconceptions about relevant behavioural factors while also offering a geographically and socio-culturally broad perspective that can address the cultural and institutional context-specificity of behavioural studies. Also, most studies focus on the adoption decision, while implementation decisions and their consequences for the ecological effectiveness of AES remain understudied.In this article, we present the results from semi-structured farmer interviews conducted in five agricultural landscapes across Europe. The results are used to uncover reasons for AES adoption as well as the implications of AES implementation decisions for their ecological effectiveness.The main reason for AES adoption that was common across case study regions is the interplay of opportunity costs and payment levels, which has negative implications for the ecological effectiveness of AES as farmers prioritized marginal land or adopted non-additional AES. Among reasons that vary across regions, tenure relations and the role of ecological reasoning stand out.We find that AES are unlikely to trigger broader shifts towards sustainable management but there is some potential for improvement, mainly by increasing the flexibility, spatial targeting and ecological ambition of the schemes.

Deliberative Monetary Valuation (DMV) was developed in response to critique on traditional stated preference methods and combines elements of deliberative institutions with the elicitation of monetary values. In the theoretical DMV literature, two strands based on different motivations for employing deliberation were identified: preference economization studies, where the goal is to help participants form informed and stable individual preferences; and preference moralization studies, where deliberation is meant to help uncover preferences that transcend individual interests and take into account a broader set of values. The common assumption is that these different motivations are reflected in distinct study design choices. However, this assumption has not been systematically verified. We present a review of the empirical DMV literature in which we systematically identify and assess the design choices made in DMV studies to verify whether the different motivations translate into different patterns in study design. We find some trends, but also a large heterogeneity within each category. The study designs seem to mainly reflect the particular focus of each study. We argue that this is linked to the lack of agreed-upon standards for DMV studies. Our review demonstrates the need for an empirically verified framework that associates motivations for deliberation with study design choices.

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Increasing soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in agricultural soils removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and contributes towards achieving carbon neutrality. For farmers, higher SOC levels have multiple benefits, including increased soil fertility and resilience against drought-related yield losses. However, increasing SOC levels requires agricultural management changes that are associated with costs. Private soil carbon certificates could compensate for these costs. In these schemes, farmers register their fields with commercial certificate providers who certify SOC increases. Certificates are then sold as voluntary emission offsets on the carbon market.In this paper, we assess the suitability of these certificates as an instrument for climate change mitigation. From a soils' perspective, we address processes of SOC enrichment, their potentials and limits, and options for cost-effective measurement and monitoring. From a farmers’ perspective, we assess management options likely to increase SOC, and discuss their synergies and trade-offs with economic, environmental and social targets. From a governance perspective, we address requirements to guarantee additionality and permanence while preventing leakage effects. Furthermore, we address questions of legitimacy and accountability.While increasing SOC is a cornerstone for more sustainable cropping systems, private carbon certificates fall short of expectations for climate change mitigation as permanence of SOC sequestration cannot be guaranteed. Governance challenges include lack of long-term monitoring, problems to ensure additionality, problems to safeguard against leakage effects, and lack of long-term accountability if stored SOC is re-emitted. We conclude that soil-based private carbon certificates are unlikely to deliver the emission offset attributed to them and that their benefit for climate change mitigation is uncertain. Additional research is needed to develop standards for SOC change metrics and monit