Soil is not dirt. It is a living, finite resource that feeds the world, filters our water, and stores more carbon than the atmosphere and all vegetation combined. Yet it is vanishing faster than it can form — and the generation that will inherit its consequences must also lead its recovery. That conviction is the seed of APSCC’s Global Young Soil Scientist Program (GYSS).
Launched by the Association for Promoting Sustainability in Campuses & Communities (APSCC), the GYSS Program engages students, youth and early-career researchers as active participants in soil science, conservation and sustainability. It is designed to move soil from the margins of the sustainability conversation into the hands of the young people best placed to protect it — giving them the knowledge, tools and leadership platform to act.
A Soil Doctors Program — for the young
The GYSS Program takes direct inspiration from the FAO / IUSS Global Soil Doctors Programme, a farmer-to-farmer initiative under the FAO’s Global Soil Partnership that trains people to diagnose and improve the health of their own soils. APSCC reimagines that model for a younger audience: where the Soil Doctors Programme empowers farmers, GYSS empowers students to become soil literate, to run simple diagnostic assessments, and to champion sustainable soil management in their campuses and communities.
Structured around learning, fieldwork and advocacy, the program aims to:
Why the urgency
Topsoil — the thin, nutrient-rich upper layer where almost all food production begins — is under sustained assault from erosion, unsustainable farming, deforestation and compaction. The FAO estimates that a third of the world’s soils are already degraded, and that soil loss costs the global economy on the order of USD 44 billion every year. A single centimetre of topsoil can take centuries to form; it can be washed away in a single season.
The stakes reach far beyond agriculture. Healthy soil sequesters carbon, buffers floods and droughts, sustains biodiversity, and underpins the resilience of entire ecosystems. Protecting it is inseparable from tackling hunger and climate change — which is why soil sits at the intersection of some of the most urgent goals on the global agenda.
Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Care for it, and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter, and surround us with beauty. Abuse it, and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.
From awareness to action: the Topsoil Conservation Series
GYSS is not an abstract idea — it is anchored in concrete APSCC programming. The flagship expression is the Topsoil Conservation Series 2024–25, a year-long awareness initiative launched in December 2024 to coincide with World Soil Day (5 December). Building on the World Soil Day 2024 theme, “Caring for Soils: Measure, Monitor, Manage,” the series carries the message of soil health across campuses and communities through workshops, field activities and student engagement over the course of a full year.
By pairing a global framing — World Soil Day, the Global Soil Partnership, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration — with local, student-driven activity, GYSS turns international commitments into measurable action on the ground.
Aligned with the SDGs
The Global Young Soil Scientist Program advances a tightly connected cluster of Sustainable Development Goals — from food security and climate resilience to the health of terrestrial ecosystems and the partnerships needed to deliver them:
Program: APSCC Global Young Soil Scientist Program (GYSS) · inspired by the FAO / IUSS Global Soil Doctors Programme and aligned with World Soil Day and the Global Soil Partnership. Implemented through the Topsoil Conservation Series 2024–25.