Making soil erosion understandable and governable at the river basin scale for food, water and hydropower sustainability in Latin America

土壤是一种基本资源，但每年约有1 000万公顷农田因土壤侵蚀而丧失，这主要是由于不可持续的农业和林业做法。侵蚀以两种方式影响总体可持续性：（a）用于粮食生产的农田减少，（B）沉积物和相关污染物排入水道，污染供水、渔业和水产养殖，并因水库淤积而降低水力发电能力。土壤侵蚀及其对环境的影响是能源-粮食-水-环境关系的核心，需要对土地管理的变化采取新的办法，以减少土壤侵蚀的社会经济影响，但尽管土壤侵蚀意义重大，但人们对它的社会层面认识不足，在拉丁美洲发援会国家几乎没有加以治理。两个因素可以解释这一点：（a）侵蚀往往是缓慢和“看不见的”，或被接受为常态，（B）侵蚀是高度复杂的，是社会经济和自然进程相互作用的结果，外部和内部驱动因素相互关联。智利-英国伙伴关系与阿根廷、巴西和墨西哥的研究人员合作，旨在开发一种新的综合方法，以了解和治理流域尺度的土壤侵蚀。我们的多学科团队将创新的科学测量方法和先进的拉丁美洲社会文化干预方法相结合，为拉丁美洲的土壤侵蚀挑战提供了一个新的框架。

Soil is a fundamental resource yet every year some 10 million ha of cropland are lost to soil erosion, mostly due to unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices. Erosion impacts overall sustainability in two ways: (a) reduction in farmland for food production, and (b) discharge of sediments and associated contaminants into water courses polluting water supply, fisheries and aquaculture, and reducing hydropower capacity due to reservoir siltation. Soil erosion and its environmental impacts sit centrally within the Energy-Food-Water-Environment Nexus.New approaches to land management change are required to reduce socio-economic impacts of soil erosion but in spite of its significance, soil erosion is insufficiently understood in its social dimensions, and is almost non-governed in Latin American DAC countries. Two factors may explain this: (a) erosion is often slow and "invisible", or accepted as the norm, and (b) erosion is highly complex, emerging from interaction of socio-economic and natural processes, with interconnected feedbacks between external and internal drivers. Working in collaboration with researchers from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, the Chile-UK partnership aims to develop a new integrated approach for understanding and governing soil erosion at the river basin scale. Our multidisciplinary team combines innovative scientific measuring methods and advanced Latin American approaches for socio-cultural intervention to provide a new framework within which soil erosion challenges in Latin America can be addressed.