Published the text for a Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience
On 5 July, the European Commission published the text of the proposal for a Directive on soil monitoring and resilience (Soil Monitoring Law), with the aim of building a solid and homogeneous monitoring system for all soils in the Union territory , necessary to achieve the soil health objective by 2050 and to comply with the international commitments relating to reset from zero land consumption and neutrality to soil and land degradation.
ISPRA, with the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security, participated in the work of the Soil Expert Group of the DG Environment of the European Commission, contributing to the elaboration of its proposal right from the early stages.
Starting from the observation that scientific evidence tells us that between 60 and 70% of European soils are currently not in good health, with closely interconnected risks for human health and environmental health, the proposed directive aims to support actions aimed at to improve and maintain soils in healthy conditions, essential for them to provide ecosystem services on a scale necessary for environmental, social and economic needs.
Among the objectives of the proposal for a European directive, in particular, the main ones are to stop and reverse soil degradation processes, to prevent and mitigate the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, to increase resilience with respect to natural disasters, to ensure food safety and reduce soil contamination to levels no longer considered harmful to human health and the environment.
The proposed measures are divided into actions for:
- soil health monitoring and assessment
- sustainable land management
- contaminated sites
The whole document proposal and attachments are available at the following link.