On the 23rd of October the European Parliament approved the new EU Soil Monitoring Law, the EU’s first piece of comprehensive legislation on soil health and a long-awaited milestone towards addressing Europe’s depleted soils. Over sixty percent of European soils are in an unhealthy condition and research shows that their condition is degrading further due to unsustainable land management, contamination and overexploitation.
What does the Soil Law cover?
The law, known as the Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience has an overarching goal of bringing EU soils to a healthy state by 2050. It introduces non-binding EU target levels and national trigger values for soil health, which aim to help member states identify priorities and gradually implement measures leading to healthier soils. It introduces a monitoring framework for all soils across the EU with common soil descriptors and classes describing soil health.
Member states will be required to set up monitoring systems to assess the physical, chemical and biological condition of soils on their territory, based on a common EU methodology. They must regularly report to the Commission and the European Environment Agency on the state of soil health, contaminated soil and land take. They must also encourage landowners and land managers to improve soil health and resilience by supportive services such as advice, innovation research and mapping. Contaminated sites, with substances including PFAS, are also addressed: Member States must assess and manage them, ensuring they do not pose a risk to human health or the environment.
What is not covered?
Despite the ambitious end goal for 2050, the current proposal does not include any legally binding targets or requirement for direct action by farmers. There are also no associated obligations on either Member States or farmers to restore unhealthy soils to good health. Measures which would have introduced new obligations on sustainable soil management were scrapped last April during the long process of seeking agreement on the draft Directive.
Negotiations also weakened provisions to limit land take, for example from development of infrastructure, and urban expansion. A previous objective of “no net land take”, has become a requirement to “take into consideration” a set of principles to reduce soil sealing and soil removal. As such there are no provisions to directly prevent Member States permitting construction and development.
Next steps
The Parliament’s endorsement of the Soil Monitoring Law came about a month after the European Council approved it, meaning that the EU legislative steps are now complete. However, it will not be fully enacted until Member States have transposed it into national law They have three years to do this after the date when the Directive comes into force.
What is happening in the UK?
As in the EU, UK soils are under threat, and a 2023 Parliamentary report found a notable lack of data on soil health historically. As both environment and agriculture are devolved policy areas, approaches to remedying this vary across the four parts of the UK. Northern Ireland’s recent Soil Nutrient Health Scheme stands out as a particularly comprehensive data collection exercise for agricultural soils, which farmers must participate in to be eligible for farm payments Scotland, Wales and England have also recognised the need for better understanding of the health and qualities of agricultural soils and have included soil testing within their respective support schemes. However, all cases testing is part of a condition for payment, as opposed to a systematic standardised data set covering samples of all soils irrespective of whether farmers are part of a scheme involving payment.
Soil scientists, policy makers and others have raised concerns about how the different approaches to monitoring agricultural soil health across the UK as well as numerous different tools and various current and historic schemes with different objectives, for monitoring soils can make like for like comparisons challenging. However, so far talk has been focused more on enabling comparability, rather than establishing a UK wide soil monitoring framework equivalent to the EU Soil Monitoring Law. Such challenges of comparability in the UK, with just 4 governments, serve to highlight the huge step forward that will be made in the EU if Member States fulfil their obligations and a new consistent data base for soils is put in place, allowing better informed and more targeted interventions.
As EU member states begin transposing the Directive into their national laws and the monitoring programme develops in practice, it will be interesting to see how this progresses and whether the data will find applications in agricultural and environmental policy.
Photo by Steven Weeks on Unsplash