ACONDICIONAMIENTO TARRASENSE ASSOCIACION
Leitat
Founded in 1906, Leitat is one of the reference entities at state and European level in technology management.
ID: 445113050531-04
Lobbying Activity
Response to Soil Health Law – protecting, sustainably managing and restoring EU soils
2 Nov 2023
Soils are home to almost 60% of life on Earth. They are the basis for our ecosystems and human life. The organisms living in our soils provide nutrients, contribute to the circulation of air and water, and help in pest control. Most of the resources we need for human activities depend on them: in the EU, soils produce 90% of our food, feed, fibre, and fuel. However, over 60% of European soils are unhealthy. SOILGUARD welcomes the proposal for a Soil Monitoring Directive as a positive step towards achieving healthy soils in the European Union. Monitoring and assessing the conditions of our soils and progress towards increasing their health is key to designing and implementing conservation actions. Establishing common standards and definitions to ensure a sound monitoring and assessment system, and results are comparable between countries. Promoting the implementation of sustainable soil management practices is essential to improving soil health. In this feedback, we provide suggestions to the proposal that we consider key for the achievement of its main goal. The establishment of a monitoring framework by Member States, based on common soil descriptors and criteria, would be of great help to understand the conditions of our soils and track progress towards improving their health. Although the proposal in Annex I set a number of important criteria and soil descriptors for monitoring and assessing the health of soils, they do not cover soil biodiversity. The only listed soil descriptor indirectly related to biodiversity is soil basal respiration. This soil descriptor would however not provide information on diversity, and neither a robust indication of biological structural nor functional health. Based on SOILGUARD expertise, and considering the importance of soil biodiversity for ecosystems, we suggest Annex I to include further mandatory soil biodiversity indicators. Generally, the monitoring framework should be able to reflect progress towards achieving soil health in order to incentivize practitioners. Unfortunately, the proposed one-out- all-out principle only considering a soil healthy when it meets all criteria listed in Annex I would not allow showing progress. Instead, tracking improvements in trends in soil health would allow understanding progress towards achieving healthy soils, and identify in which areas efforts are most needed. Soil sampling protocols must be adapted to the local soil types, e.g., natural soils have often variable layers as they are not homogenized by human activities as cultivated soils. For example, the recommended LUCAS sampling design is not optimal for soils in forests and peatlands. Furthermore, often deeper sampling is needed to obtain correct understanding of soil C stocks. Future soil monitoring efforts should be better connected to existing aboveground monitoring, as land use and productivity determine greatly soil characteristics, and this is also the only way to understand causal relationships. Thus, the forthcoming monitoring should utilize the previous (EU-level or national) monitoring data series (as ICP Forest). In the case of LUCAS, more detailed aboveground descriptions should be included into the monitoring to increase the utility of the soil data. Given the timescale of soils, it might be more suitable to concentrate monitoring efforts in a longer sampling history, and to prioritize obtaining good quality aboveground data rather than high quantity of samples.
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