These guidelines are designed to designed to address the key challenges humanity faces today: Climate change, loss of soils and food insecurity. Soil organic carbon sequestration has been shown to hold the largest sink potential in terrestrial ecosystems and agroecosystems. The implementation of proven Soil Organic Carbon (SOC)-centred Sustainable Soil Management (SSM) practices for maintaining carbon rich soils (peatlands, black soils, permafrost, etc.) and for sequestering more carbon in soils with such potential (croplands and degraded soils), would address the challenge of compensating global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The main objective is to support and improve national and regional-level greenhouse gas mitigation and carbon sequestration initiatives.