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Rethinking rehabilitation of salt-affected land: new perspectives from Australian experience

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 16:06 authored by Leake, JE, Squires, V, Sergey ShabalaSergey Shabala
Soil salinity is a major threat to the sustainability of agricultural production systems and has defeated civilisations whenever the cost of remediation exceeded the benefits. Among the reasons for this is the complexity of the plant-water-soil nexus and that the causes of salinity are often separated from the damage in time and space. There have been many activities to address salinity, and while good progress has occurred in commercially attractive irrigation areas, many apparently successful techniques, such as intercropping obligate halophytes with conventional crops, processing halophyte meals for human consumption and new uses for saline waters, have not been taken up, although the benefit in ecological terms is understood. There are limited payments available for some ecosystem services, but these are not yet a very recognised market for land users, whose agency is essential for long term success and addressing this requires institutional evolution. We conclude, from Australian experience, that a more concerted effort, perhaps initiated by a philanthropist, is needed to show merchants and agencies how a range of payments for ecosystem services can be turned into true markets in an aggregate way so the ‘knowledge of what can be done can be transformed into benefit’.

History

Publication title

Earth

Pagination

245-258

ISSN

2673-4834

Department/School

Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA)

Publisher

MDPI AG

Place of publication

Switzerland

Rights statement

© 2022 by The Authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Climate adaptive plants

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