Rattan Lal
Putting soil organic carbon at the centre of food security and climate policy at the same time, and proving the two move together.
The record
- Standing
- foundational work
- Based
- Carbon Management and Sequestration Center, The Ohio State University · Columbus, Ohio
- The work
- From 1970s research in West Africa on reducing deforestation and controlling erosion, to co-writing the first documented report showing that restoring degraded soil by taking carbon dioxide out of the air improves the soil and defends against rising atmospheric carbon dioxide at once.
- Founded
- The Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State, which he leads.
- Taught
- 375 doctoral and postdoctoral students mentored.
- Recognition
- World Food Prize, 2020, for developing and mainstreaming a soil-centric approach to increasing food production that conserves natural resources and mitigates climate change.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Lal’s career began in West Africa in the 1970s, working on deforestation and erosion, and the through-line from there to the World Food Prize is a single variable: soil organic carbon.
The argument he made, and then spent decades documenting, is that the carbon lost from the world’s cultivated soils is both a yield problem and an atmospheric one, and that putting it back addresses both. In the 1990s he co-authored the first documented report to state that case in those terms. It is now the intellectual basis of essentially every carbon-farming programme, every soil-health initiative, and a good deal of climate policy.
The 375 students he has mentored are arguably the larger legacy. The 2020 prize citation is careful to credit not just the research but the mainstreaming of it.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
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