The urgency of building soils for Middle Eastern and North African countries: Economic, environmental, and health solutions.

Soil degradation is a short or long ongoing process that limits ecosystem services. Intensive land use, water scarcity, land disturbance, and global climate change have reduced the quality of soils worldwide. This degradation directly threatens most of the land in the Middle East and North Africa, while the remaining areas are at high risk of further desertification. Rehabilitation and control of these damaged environments are essential to avoid negative effects on human well-being (e.g., poverty, food insecurity, wars, etc.). Here we review constructed soils involving the use of waste materials as a solution to soil degradation and present approaches to address erosion, organic matter oxidation, water scarcity and salinization. Our analysis showed a high potential for using constructed soil as a complimentary reclamation solution in addition to traditional ones. Constructed soils could have the ability to overcome the limitations of existing solutions to tackle land degradation while contributing to the solution of waste management problems. These soils facilitate the provision of multiple ecosystem services and have the potential to address particularly challenging land degradation problems in semi and dry climates.
Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Maha Deeb, Stephan Pauleit reports financial support, travel, and writing assistance were provided by German Research Foundation. Andrey Valentinovich Smagin reports financial support and writing assistance were provided by Russian Science Foundation. Maha Deeb reports a relationship with Technical University of Munich that includes: consulting or advisory, funding grants, and speaking and lecture fees. Andrey Valentinovich Smagin reports a relationship with Lomonosov Moscow State University that includes: employment and funding grants. This work is original research written by researchers from different origins and rich academic backgrounds to explore ways to construct soils by using local materials to overcome resource limitations and improve human quality of life. The analysis is focused on particularly challenging land degradation contexts in the Middle East and North Africa. All the co-authors contributed to this review through years of expertise in the Middle Eastern and North African Countries. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare and there is no significant financial support for this work that can influence its outcome. We declare that this manuscript has not been published before, in whole or in part, and is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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