| Vorwort | 4 |
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| Foreword | 5 |
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| The Challenge of Sustaining Soils | 10 |
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| 1. The rationale of the book | 10 |
| 2. Challenges of a changing world | 10 |
| 3. DPSIR, or how can we conceptualize the links between societies and natural systems? | 14 |
| 4. Putting soils centre stage of the sustainability debate | 15 |
| 5. Perspectives | 18 |
| 6. Acknowledgements | 18 |
| Chapter I: Endangered soils: A long-term view of the natural and social ramifications of biomass production in agriculture and forestry | 21 |
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| 1. Soils and socio-ecological regimes 1.1. Non-sustainable human-soil interaction | 22 |
| 1.2. Rights to land | 25 |
| 1.3. Non-industrial agriculture | 29 |
| 1.4. Agriculture and the industrial revolution | 32 |
| 1.5. The way to high-input agriculture | 34 |
| 2. Energy from biomass: sustainable provision today and in the future | 35 |
| 2.1. Forest resources | 38 |
| 2.2. Energy crops | 41 |
| 2.3. Impacts on soils | 41 |
| 3. Conclusions | 43 |
| 4. References | 45 |
| Chapter II: Productive soils, global environmental cycles and energy crops | 57 |
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| 1. Introduction | 57 |
| 2. Soils in geological cycles | 58 |
| 3. Soil organic matter (SOM) | 59 |
| 4. The elemental cycles of carbon and nitrogen | 62 |
| 4.1. The carbon cycle | 62 |
| 4.2. The nitrogen cycle | 66 |
| 5. Energy crops: A link between soil and atmosphere | 68 |
| 6. Conclusions | 71 |
| 7. References | 73 |
| Chapter III: Land use from below: Biofuels, urbanization and sustainable soil management in Europe and Africa | 81 |
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| 1. Introduction | 81 |
| 2. Formulating policy in a hypothetical world | 83 |
| 2.1. Hypothetical landscapes | 84 |
| 2.2. Hypothetical crops | 87 |
| 3. Agrofuels (1st-generation biofuels) 3.1. EU Climate change mandates and agrofuels market develop-ment | 89 |
| 3.2. Agrofuels production | 92 |
| 4. 2nd-generation biofuels | 100 |
| 4.1. Production technologies | 101 |
| 4.2. Feedstocks | 103 |
| 4.3. Water and albedo | 108 |
| 5. Biofuels and the African continent | 114 |
| 5.1. Hypothetical landscapes | 117 |
| 5.2. Soil loss | 123 |
| 5.3. Soil-plant interactions | 125 |
| 5.4. Water | 131 |
| 5.5. Albedo | 141 |
| 6. Urbanization and climate change | 145 |
| 6.1. Urban expansion | 146 |
| 6.2. Soil sealing | 147 |
| 6.3. Urban soil dependencies | 150 |
| 6.4. Urban soils and climate change | 153 |
| 6.5. Urbanization and African biofuels production | 154 |
| 7. Opportunities for soil restoration | 156 |
| 7.1. Rural soils | 157 |
| 7.2. Urban soils | 159 |
| 8. Summary and conclusions | 161 |
| 9. References | 168 |