Soil salinity under climate change: Challenges for sustainable agriculture and food security

Overview of the Role of Rhizobacteria in Plant Salt Stress Tolerance

“…At present, there is scientific consensus indicating that the human production model and energetic consumption are involved in climate change [1]. The impact that this global climatic alteration causes is translated into adverse environmental conditions, such as salinity in soils, extreme temperatures, droughts, or floods, which limit the geographical distribution of plant species and crop yields [2,3]. These types of extreme processes mainly affect semi-arid and arid regions, and they have not only environmental impacts but also economic and social repercussions [2,4].…”

“…In this sense, it has been estimated that 20% of cultivated lands and 33% of irrigated agricultural lands worldwide are affected by salinity [5][6][7]10]. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations [11,12], and other scientific literature [2,5,[13][14][15][16], these percentages represent an approximate area of more than 900 million hectares, of which about 77 million hectares could be human-induced salt-affected soils [13]. Furthermore, the rate of lands degraded by salinity increases annually by 10% due to various factors, such as climate change, poor irrigation practices, and other natural processes [5,7,10].…”

“…The impact generated by salinity is predominantly focused in arid and semi-arid regions, where evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation [13,17], although other edaphic, hydrologic, topographic, biological, and anthropogenic factors also interfere in this degradative process [3]. Oceania and Asia are the most-affected continents, as they present 39% and 34% of salt-affected soils globally, respectively; this jointly equates to 374 million hectares [2,11,13]. Considering human-induced salinization, the percentages in Asia are higher than in the other regions (approximately 70%), followed by Africa (20%) and Europe (5%) [13].…”

“…Taking into account studies carried out in India with different crops (rice, wheat, cotton, or sugar cane), production losses due to salt-affected soils may exceed 30% [18]. Economically, this could represent an annual cost of US$ 27.3 billion [2,13,18], assuming only losses due to a reduction of crop yield, without counting the additional inputs required to mitigate the impact of saline degradation of soils. However, according to the FAO [12], the annual loss of agricultural productivity has been estimated to be US$ 31 million, with production losses between 20-40%.…”

Soil Microbial Communities Altered by Titanium Ions in Different Agroecosystems of Pitaya and Grape

“…Global agriculture has to increase food production to cope with rapid population growth, while reducing the use of factory fertilizers and chemical pesticides [1,2]. For improving agricultural production, and establishing sustainable and eco-friendly agriculture, some bene cial methods have been explored, such as applying new agricultural growth regulators, keeping soil micro-ecological balance and developing probiotics, etc.…”