Saline Agriculture: A Call to Action

Agendas of climate change adaptation and food production under saline conditions provide an opportunity for new initiatives by investors, international and national organizations. With a major bottleneck being the availability of “bankable” projects, it is important to invest in capacity building, setting-up local pilot projects and establishing regional centers of excellence for saline agricultural research and development. We argue that the investment agenda should be transdisciplinary and multinational covering field experiments, socio-economic research and policy evaluation. This corresponds with the key messages from the 2019 International Saline Futures Conference, the rapidly increasing area of salt-degraded land, the potential of saline agriculture and the urgent need to adapt. Developing food production practices which can take advantage of saline soil and water conditions are crucial to safeguard livelihoods and food security at the local and global level. Strengthening the international community of research and practice is a prerequisite.