England publishes first baseline soil-health indicators for flood control, carbon and arable production
England has released the first experimental national soil-health indicators covering runoff mitigation, carbon storage and sustainable arable crop provision using 2023-2024 baseline data.
The UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee and the English government published a first release of official statistics in development on soil health for rural England on March 25, 2026. The exercise is designed as a five-year baseline, but the current release uses only year-one evidence covering 2023-2024. The agencies stress that the results should still be treated as demonstrative rather than fully representative because the baseline is not yet complete.
Instead of relying on a single laboratory metric, the framework measures how soils contribute to ecosystem services. The release focuses on three areas: reducing runoff and surface-water flood risk, storing carbon now and over the long term, and supporting sustainable arable crop provision. Coverage is limited to rural England, while freshwater, marine, woodland and urban areas are outside scope.
For runoff reduction, rural English soils scored 63.5% when inherent soil properties and management are assessed together. The management-only optimisation score was 64.0%. The authors note that this is not a forecast of where floods will happen; it is a national-scale estimate of how current soil condition contributes to runoff mitigation through infiltration and soil structure.
On carbon, the median stock in rural English soils was estimated at 71 tonnes of carbon per hectare. Mineral soils showed a median of 68 t C/ha, while peat soils reached 135 t C/ha. The modelled score for long-term carbon storage was 59.6% overall, but only 35.3% for the management-related optimisation component. That gap matters for agriculture because the stability of soil carbon affects both climate performance and the long-term condition of the production base.
For sustainable arable crop provision, the release reported a 61.9% score for soils’ overall contribution and 55.9% for optimisation through management. As more field data are added, the indicator set is expected to move from a baseline snapshot toward tracking change over time. For farmers and policymakers, the new framework links soil condition not only to crop output, but also to water regulation, carbon stability and production resilience.