Professor Keith WT Goulding is the current president of the British Society of Soil Science. One of his most notable achievements was being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize certificate for his contribution to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for which the panel and Al Gore were jointly awarded the prize in 2007.
He will be speaking at Brownfield Briefing's Future of Soil conference on March 26, so we caught up with him ahead of the event.
1. At the Future of Soil conference, what do you feel are the key issues surrounding the topic you are speaking on?
Unrealistic expectations of how much carbon can be sequestered in soils. 2. The risk of causing other problems when trying to sequester carbon: e.g. increasing nitrous oxide emissions by changing from ploughing to Min-/No-Till in an attempt to sequester carbon
2. What do you predict will be a major Environmental issue in 2020?
Climate Change
3. What do you think are the three biggest developments/achievements from 2008?
1. PAS 2050 for life cycle analysis. 2. Establishment of the UK Biochar Research Centre at Edinburgh. 3. The failure of the EU Environment Council to ratify the Soil Framework Directive.
4. What has been your favourite project/issue to follow in the past 18 months?
The initiation of a new integrated project to study the biology, chemistry and physics of the soil in a new ‘reversion' experiment that is studying the impacts on soil quality of changing land use - fallow to arable and grassland and arable and grassland to fallow. This will include impacts on carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions.
