Dutch designer Thom Bindels has developed Ecosystem Kickstarter, a honeycomb-shaped cardboard frame that can help small-scale farmers grow crops in degraded soil.
The simple, modular, cardboard system, which was first presented at Dutch Design Week, is embedded in a slope of degraded earth and filled with local soil.
This forms a terracing structure to prevent the runoff of seeds and nutrients in rainwater.

Ecosystem Kickstarter (Ecokick) biodegrades, and when it does it will grow a strip of "perennial terracing vegetation" because the cardboard is enriched with seeds and nutrients.
The resulting terraced crops fulfil the same stabilising function the cardboard originally served. In between these organic fortifications, food crops are protected from erosion and able to flourish.
Ultimately, this could break the vicious cycle of soil erosion, which is exacerbated by climate change as long periods of drought followed by brief, torrential rainfall mean that fertile top soil and seeds are flushed away before they get a chance to germinate.
This leads to a lack of vegetation, which in turn makes it even harder for water to penetrate into the baked soil in the future.

"When this process continues for too long, the ecosystem can no longer restore itself," Bindels told Dezeen. "A negative spiral of erosion causes a lack of nutrients in the soil, a lack of soil activity and a lack of groundwater."
"The point where an ecosystem is no longer able ...