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Soil erosion threatens food production and ecosystems. This study finds that soil erosion rates change significantly at national borders, probably reflecting agricultural characteristics that vary among countries.

Soil erosion is a major threat to food security and ecosystem viability, as current rates are orders of magnitude higher than natural soil formation. Governments around the world are trying to address the issue of soil erosion. However, we do not know whether countries have much actual control over their soil erosion. Here, we use a high-resolution, global dataset with over 35 million observations and a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify how much of the global rate of soil erosion is actually affected by countries and which country characteristics, including their policies, are associated with this. Overall, moving just across the border from one country to the next, the rate of soil erosion changes on average by ~1.4 t ha(-1) yr(-1), which reveals a surprisingly large country effect. The best explanation we find is countries' agricultural characteristics.