Isabelle Verbeke

Isabelle Verbeke is a land and water officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). She joined FAO in 2002 and the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) secretariat in 2012. Since then, she leads the communication team and is responsible for the GSP’s overall communication strategy, advocacy strategies with partners and the development and coordination of communication campaigns, mainly the World Soil Day (WSD) and the International Year of Soils in 2015. WSD celebrations grew significantly from 8 celebrations in 2014 to 781 celebrations in 2021, with a global outreach of 1.15 billion users. She is also responsible for the maintenance of 10 FAO soil-related websites and the FAO publication workflow on soils. She also coordinated the successful organization of 5 policy-science symposia organized between 2017 and 2021 on a number of soil threats (soil organic carbon, soil pollution, soil erosion, soil biodiversity and salt-affected soils).