  Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays an important role on improving soil
conditions and soil functions. Increasing land use changes have induced an
important decline of SOC content at global scale. Increasing SOC in
agricultural soils has been proposed as a strategy to mitigate climate change.
Animal manure has the characteristic of enriching SOC, when applied to crop
fields, while, in parallel, it could constitute a natural fertilizer for the
crops. In this paper, a simulation is performed using the area of Catalonia,
Spain as a case study for the characteristic low SOC in the Mediterranean, to
examine whether animal manure can improve substantially the SOC of agricultural
fields, when applied as organic fertilizers. Our results show that the policy
goals of the 4x1000 strategy can be achieved only partially by using manure
transported to the fields. This implies that the proposed approach needs to be
combined with other strategies.
