Healthy soils are essential for achieving climate neutrality, a clean and circular economy and stopping desertification and land degradation. They are also essential to reverse biodiversity loss, provide healthy food and safeguard human health.

The EU soil strategy for 2030 provides the framework and concrete steps towards protecting and restoring soils, and ensuring that they are used sustainably. As part of this, a new Soil Monitoring Law has been proposed to ensure a level playing field and a high level of environmental and health protection.

It is a key deliverable of the EU biodiversity strategy for 2030 and will contribute to the objectives of the European Green Deal.

The new law aims to address key soil threats in the EU, such as erosion, floods and landslides, loss of soil organic matter, salinisation, contamination, compaction, sealing, as well as loss of soil biodiversity.

The new Soil Monitoring Law provides a legal framework to help achieve healthy soils by 2050. It will do so by:

• putting in place a solid and coherent monitoring framework for all soils across the EU so Member States can take measures to regenerate degraded soils;
• making sustainable soil management the norm in the EU. Member States will have to define which practices should be implemented by soil managers and which should be banned because they cause soil degradation; and
• requesting Member States to identify potentially contaminated sites, investigate these sites and address unacceptable risks for human health and the environment, thereby contributing to a toxic-free environment by 2050.

More information:

• European Commission Soils Health Webpage
• Proposal for a Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience