Soil indicators for sustainable development: A transdisciplinary approach for indicator development using expert stakeholders

Sustainable management of soils is needed to accomplish many of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, but it can be problematic in practice as soils are complex and to manage them sustainably requires the co-operation of multiple stakeholders on various level of society. We present the outcome of a transdisciplinary approach towards indicator development, where we created a set of soil indicators for sustainable development with stakeholder group participation from scientists, policy makers and soil practitioners. The groups evaluated 49 indicators, through a Delphi survey technique, and selected a set of 30 indicators. Of these 14 were common to all stakeholder groups and represented a final set of core soil indicators for sustainable development. The Delphi survey did suffer from high attrition rate and low response rate, especially among the policy makers, which limits somewhat its findings. Nevertheless, the survey illustrated the usefulness of relevant stakeholder involvement in an indicator development process and the role of survey based instruments in aiding the selection of common indicators, whilst showing the different views of stakeholders groups. Given that the stakeholder groups have to consider a multitude of variables and impacts on soil and may have different focus and management goals in mind, a process such as this can serve as a starting point for discussion between stakeholder groups on various levels of governance about how to manage soil sustainably and help to fulfil the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.