As UN climate talks in Paris hit their mid-way point, many are marking World Soil Day—and soil’s untapped role into solving the climate crisis.

Why World Soil Day? “Because soil is something to celebrate—and protect,” Lara Bryant, Soil Health Fellow at NRDC, writes  at the organization’s Switchboard blog. “Healthy soil is the foundation for nutritious food, clean water, and sustainable agriculture,” she writes.

“Soil is so much more powerful than most of us realize,” stated Diana Donlon, food and climate director at the Center for Food Safety (CFS).

It’s what CFS and many other organizations, farmers, and organic advocates have stressed. Here’s why: as a report from CFS’s Cool Foods Campaign released in April stated, “cultivated soils globally have lost 50-70 percent of their original carbon content.” But atmospheric CO2, which is fueling climate change, can be shifted into the soil where it’s needed, providing numerous benefits. From Common Dreams:

And as environmental activist and author Vandana Shiva wrote this year, research by her organization Navdanya “has shown that organic farming has increased carbon absorption by 55 per cent. International studies show that with two tonne per hectare of soil organic carbon, we can remove 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which can reduce atmospheric pollution to 350 parts per million.”

That’s why Larry Kopald, co-founder and president of organization The Carbon Underground, heralded soil regeneration as “shovel-ready solution” to the climate crisis.

Speaking at the Moral Action on Climate Justice demonstration in Washington, DC in September, Kopald said it’s “a solution that will put carbon back in the ground, a solution that will feed us better, make us healthier, create jobs, and even boost our economy.”

Donlon added, “Through regenerative farming practices, we have the ability to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, where it is wreaking havoc, and store it in the soil, where it is greatly lacking and where it has multiple benefits for food, water and climate security.”

That ability should be noted at the UN talks, groups say.