Correction to: Nature Reviews Earth & Environmenthttps://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00621-2, published online 7 January 2025. In the version of this article initially published, the wrong reference (215) was cited in the first and third sentences of the second paragraph of Box 1, which has now been replaced with citations to new ref. 225: Wakatsuki, T. & Masunaga, T. Ecological engineering for sustainable food production and the restoration of degraded watersheds in tropics of low pH soils: focus on West Africa. Soil Sci. Plant Nutr. 51, 629–636 (2005). The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.