Burden to Opportunity: Unlocking the Potential of Salt-affected Lands through High-nature Agriculture

Secondary soil salinization is an accelerating global sustainability challenge that reduces agricultural productivity, erodes biodiversity, and undermines ecosystem resilience across diverse landscapes. Unlike primary salinization, which occurs over millennia through natural processes, secondary salinization develops within years to decades, driven by climate change and human activities. Affected landscapes exhibit symptoms beyond elevated soil salinity, including structural soil degradation, compaction, loss of soil organic matter, vegetation loss and diminished soil health. These interacting processes degrade ecosystem functions and create feedback loops that intensify land degradation. Although empirical data remain limited, widespread reports from practitioners and communities indicate multitaxon biodiversity collapse in saline agroecosystems. Understanding the drivers of this collapse is critical. While salt stress is often assumed to be the main cause, evidence from naturally saline landscapes suggests that soil structural degradation, habitat loss, overgrazing, and land abandonment exert stronger influences on terrestrial biodiversity than salinity alone.

Against this backdrop, we explore Nature-based Solutions (NbS), understood as actions to address societal challenges through the protection, sustainable management and restoration of ecosystems, in saline landscapes. Halophytes, plants adapted to saline environments, offer opportunities to enhance species diversity, improve soil health, and increase agricultural yields, addressing key challenges of secondary salinization.

In this article, we identify halophyte-based NbS and determine their potential to restore biodiversity in salt-affected agricultural landscapes. We address this objective by monitoring biodiversity dynamics in natural and agricultural saline landscapes, implementing saline NbS in six locations and analyzing relationships between agricultural practices, ecological processes, and ecosystem services in salt-degraded systems using a mixed-methods approach. Our findings demonstrate how saline NbS can support high-nature value and climate-resilient agriculture, offering a pathway to upscale productivity, diversify livelihoods, and bend both the land degradation and biodiversity loss curves under global change. This work contributes to scientific debates on sustainable agriculture and informs policy discussions on the effectiveness of NbS in salt-affected lands.