Reflections at the Crossroad of Economics and Soil Sciences on the Concept of Soil Capital : An Economic Perspective of Soil Resource

Although it is a very important natural resource, soils remain understudied by environmental and natural resource economists. During last decades, soil scientists improved significantly their understanding of soil dynamics and functioning. In this paper, we propose a reflection on how soil scientists and economists can cooperate. We present the general theoretical framework to include soil as a natural resource, a capital stock, in economic models. We discuss the reality of soil representation in these models, insisting on the potential of taking soil organic matter as a soil capital proxy. We expand our framework to include environmental services. Finally, we discuss two raising issues in natural resource economics: the possibility of threshold in agrosystems and the concept of resilience. This paper is thus a compilation of several original potential orientations for further research