Opportunities for soil sustainability in Europe
Downloads
Click Download Link
Introduction
Soils provide numerous essential services in terrestrial ecosystems, ranging from the support of plant growth in agriculture and forestry to moderation of flood risks, water purification, large-scale carbon storage, and support of biodiversity. However, despite soils’ essential roles, they are threatened by sealing, compaction, reductions in quality and organic-carbon content, and erosion, and insufficiently included in sustainability planning in the EU. A multidisciplinary group of European experts has examined the implications of recent scientific research for integrated policy solutions towards ensuring the sustainability of Europe’s soils, and identified many opportunities for policy-makers to safeguard this valuable resource for the benefit of the EU’s citizens.
Foreword
Mahatma Gandhi once said that ‘to forget how to tend the soils is to forget ourselves’, reflecting our dependency on good quality soils for our food. At his time, most of the population still lived close to agriculture and the soils on which it depended; now, however, with the majority of the global population in urban environments, concrete and asphalt may be more familiar than soil, with little awareness of how much we rely for our well-being on the complex living ecosystems of soils which play such important roles in health, biodiversity, climate change, the water cycle and others.
Despite soils being so important for our daily life, in many regions of the world, unawareness, unsustainable industrialised agriculture, poverty and other socioeconomic factors lead to destruction of good soils. Concerns over a general lack of awareness of the importance of soils, and global trends towards soil loss and degradation, led the United Nations 68th General Assembly to declare 2015 the International Year of Soils (IYS). IYS aimed to increase awareness and understanding of the profound importance of soil for human life, and to educate the public about the crucial role soil plays in food security, climate change adaptation and mitigation, essential ecosystem services, poverty alleviation and sustainable development.
Since 2015, attention to soils globally has increased substantially and numerous programmes, also encouraged by the Sustainable Development Goals, have been initiated to promote sustainable soil management to protect the soil’s ability to feed the growing global population, counteract biodiversity loss and slow down the rate of climate change. Against this background, it may seem strange that only a year before IYS, the European Commission had withdrawn a proposed Soils Directive in the face of opposition from several Member States. Since then the debate on whether further steps in Europe are necessary to protect our soils has been in somewhat of a hiatus. Indeed, soils seldom make the headlines, and we rather take for granted that they will be there in future providing the same or improved productivity and other ecosystem services.
Seldom do we think how long it took to create the soils that provide our crops or support our natural landscapes, or realise that, on a human timescale, they are essentially a non-renewable resource. When we do read about desertification we think of distant countries with little connection to our own well-being, whereas in fact it affects us as well both directly (in southern Member States) and indirectly (by driving poverty and migration pressures). We therefore thought it was very timely when the Dutch Academy offered to lead an EASAC project on soils, based on the premise that a lot of science had emerged since the last time this was discussed in depth within the European Union, and that a review of the implications of such science to policy would be timely.
EASAC’s Environment Steering Panel supported this idea and EASAC Council agreed in May 2016. The project started in November 2016 with a scoping workshop comprising 20 experts nominated by EASAC academies. The expert group reviewed the science, and then worked with our Environment Programme Director to produce this report, which considers the implications for future EU policy. The report focuses particularly on soil biodiversity and its contribution to above-ground diversity, soils and modern farming (including the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy), and linkages between soil, plant and human health.
It also examines in detail the various interactions between soils and climate change (including the ‘4 per mille’ initiative). There then follows a very detailed discussion about the possible policy implications. We believe this report brings new perspectives to debate, which should revitalise discussions within the European Union on how we can work together to protect this essentially non-renewable resource in the absence of a Soils Directive. We point to several important synergies and possible ways forward to better manage soils nationally and to better coordinate activities between Member States. As the United Nations and its Food and Agriculture Organization prepare to conduct a global soil biodiversity assessment, this is the time for Europe to think again about what measures it should collectively take to protect the future of this valuable resource beneath our feet.
Thierry Courvoisier
President EASAC
Summary
Debate on how to achieve sustainable soil management across the European Union (EU) led to the adoption of the Soil Thematic Strategy in 2006, but insufficient support among Member States obliged the European Commission to withdraw proposals for a Soils Directive in 2014. Joint actions relating to soil sustainability remain within the 7th Environment Action Programme. Internationally, however, attention to soils has been growing, recognising the importance of soils as a nonrenewable resource on which we depend for several key human needs as expressed within the Sustainable Development Goals.
In view of the divergence of such trends within and outside the EU, the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council (EASAC) decided to review recent scientific understanding on the role of soils and consider implications for EU policy. The study was assisted by an expert group led by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen) and is intended to contribute to debate and decisions within the European Commission, European Council and European Parliament, as well as national governments and other stakeholders. The increased actions on soils in the international context include the formation of the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO’s) Global Soil Partnership.
The United Nations’ (UN’s) Sustainable Development Goals on food security, human health and terrestrial environment make explicit reference to the need to preserve soil resources. The Intergovernmental SciencePolicy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services has also addressed issues on soil sustainability. The crucial role of soils and the threats they face are described in this report, with a focus on understanding soils’ ecosystem services, the role of soils in supporting above-ground biodiversity, maintaining sustainable soils in agriculture, linkages to healthy food and human health, and soils’ contributions to mitigating climate change. We conclude that there are several implications for policy, which include the following.
1. Soil sustainability has been defined by the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils and these criteria should inform a review of EU-wide measurement and monitoring coordination between Member States and establish locally appropriate benchmarks to allow policy makers and land managers to determine whether they are moving towards sustainability. There are shortcomings to available data arising from different national monitoring systems which should be addressed; for example, through the European Soil Data Centre (section 7.2).
2. Soil biodiversity underpins the provision of key ecosystem services which support aboveground biodiversity and productivity. Biodiversity is protected under various directives and international agreements but without explicit mention of soil biodiversity. In the lack of a European Soils Directive, it is desirable to consider soil biodiversity protection within the Habitat Directive, Natura 2000 and other biodiversityrelated initiatives (section 3).
3. There can be conflict between short-term pressures to maximise monetary returns through high input and high yields in agriculture, and long-term sustainability of the soil. The ability of soil to produce ecosystem services (food, feed, fibre, retaining carbon and nutrients in the soil, promoting structural stability, water infiltration and retention, climate regulation and below- and above-ground biodiversity) offer benefits to society as a whole (sections 4.2 and 7.7).
4. The 2013 Common Agricultural Policy revision, placing the joint provision of private and public goods at the core of policy, recognises the need to balance the short-term private and longer-term societal interests, but initial evaluations suggest effects on sustainability have been limited. Options are available now to improve beneficial effects on soils (e.g. encouraging crop rotation within the crop diversification requirement and including wider areas of grassland in the permanent grassland protection requirement (sections 4.2 and 7.6)). When future measures are considered for the next Common Agricultural Policy, specific targets for improving soil should be included.
5. The increased demand for simultaneously delivering multiple services (to farmers and society) increases the need for expert advice. A strengthening of independent advisory and extension services is needed (sections 7.4 and 7.6).
6. A barrier to achieving sustainable use of soils is the lack of awareness of the extent and seriousness of land degradation, because food at the point of production and consumption is often very distant from the ecosystems that produced the source crop. The EU, national agencies and local authorities could provide a more supportive policy environment for a soil awareness and education strategy. Encouraging people to relate to food production and producers in their local soils could use labelling schemes, which show that farmers have managed their soil in a sustainable way (sections 7.6 and 7.7).
7. On food quality, high-yielding crops contain lower concentrations of micronutrients, and reduced 2 | September 2018 | Soil sustainability EASAC levels of secondary metabolites, which affects their contribution to a healthy diet. The roles of soil and crop breeding need to be better understood to prevent further micronutrient loss in higheryielding crops (section 5).
8. The growing use of human and animal antibiotics and other medicines raises concerns about their effects on soil biodiversity and the development of new forms of antibiotic resistance in soil. Protecting soil biodiversity helps provide control of not only human, but also animal and plant pathogens. At the same time, soil microbes naturally produce numerous antibiotics that may offer a source of new antibiotics or other metabolites useful for humanity (section 5).
9. Soils play a key role in climate regulation and contain two to three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. Their importance is recognised in the ‘4 per mille’ initiative, which offers many beneficial side effects (for soil biodiversity, soil structure, water holding capacity, increased nutrient cycling while preventing nutrient loss, and biological control) and should be supported. However, initial estimates of the potential to substantially offset the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide are too optimistic. Increasing soil carbon depends on local soil characteristics, nutrient availability and land management, so location-specific advice is necessary (sections 6.3 and 7.4).
10. In the priority to increasing soil organic carbon, it is important not to overlook the potential for large losses of soil carbon through continued unsustainable use of peat soils or degrading wetlands. Protection and restoration of peatlands is critical to maintaining and increasing soil organic carbon in the EU. Options include encouraging European eco-label standards, rationalising grant schemes to incorporate the carbon stock value of peat, expanding funding options for peatland rewetting and paludiculture development, and providing incentives and rewards through land use, land-use change, and forestry accounting rules (sections 6.3 and 7.4).
11. Climate change has both direct and indirect consequences for soils, as it changes soil biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles, and causes shifts in natural range limits of plant and animal species to higher latitudes and altitudes. These drive changes in agricultural practices, local vegetation composition, conditions for local wildlife and may enhance the spread of invasive exotic plant species. All these changes have the potential to change local biodiversity, carbon stocks and nutrient cycles of soils, especially when agricultural and forestry practices are changing, ecosystems are colonised by species with novel traits or when diverse ecological communities become dominated by single species (section 6.1).
12. Loss of agricultural land through soil sealing increases the demand for agricultural imports which drives deforestation in countries exporting to the EU. Strategies for reducing demands on soil sealing (and other forms of land taking for mining, etc.) need to be applied; for instance, by integrating the full value of land taken (including the value of its ecosystem services) into the planning process for urban development and infrastructure, and by minimising demand for new surface mining by recycling minerals and construction materials. The EU analyses of community action required to reduce global deforestation should recognise soil sealing within the EU as a potential driver (section 7.3).
13. Many business supply chains depend on soils and their ecosystem services, so the current global trend of soil degradation across 12 million hectares each year threatens the capability to meet the growing global needs for food and resources as populations grow and diets change. This, combined with public interest in healthy food, protection from disease and cultural interest in parks, natural habitats and wildlife, broadens the stakeholders with an interest in soil and its sustainability (section 7.5).
14. Looking at the role of international initiatives, many processes of soil degradation are associated with food, forestry, textile, construction material and biofuel production, so pressures on soil are exacerbated by the demands of a rising global population. It is important that EU countries contribute to the range of international initiatives currently underway and incorporate the role of soils in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (section 7.1).
Introduction
The fundamental importance of soils in supporting agriculture and forestry is widely recognised, with many examples of the drastic consequences of its loss1. However, in addition to the basic functions of supplying essential nutrients, water, oxygen and support for plants, we now better understand the many other essential services provided by soils in terrestrial ecosystems.
Soils are a critical part of the hydrological cycle and can moderate flood risk and contribute to water purification. Moreover, soils contain massive quantities of carbon which, if released into the atmosphere, substantially accelerate the pace of global warming and the associated climate change. Fully functional soils support a biodiverse ecosystem which is essential for the stability of ecosystem functions and to suppress soil-borne diseases, while also providing a potential source of genetic resources.
Moreover, although soils are the result of natural processes, these processes are exceedingly slow and from the perspective of human life times, soils need to be regarded as a nonrenewable resource. Such considerations led the European Commission (EC) to include soil in the Sixth Environment Action Programme in 2002 and introduce a Soil Thematic Strategy (EC, 2006). As part of the support for this strategy, the European Union’s (EU’s) Joint Research Centre (JRC) conducted a comprehensive review of the state of soils in Europe (JRC, 2012) which identified numerous threats to soil sustainability and the challenges to achieving sustainable soil uses in the future.
Since then, attention to soils has been increasing further at the global level; for example, the Global Soil Partnership was established in 2012, leading to the 2015 UN International Year of Soils. Concerns over the sustainability of soils in the above analyses included the continued losses through ‘soil sealing’ (covering living soil by housing, infrastructure, construction, etc.), compaction and reductions in soil quality and soil organic carbon (SOC) content through intensive agriculture and forestry, erosion by both water and wind, salinisation, and contamination by toxic materials.
Estimates of the costs of some of these threats were up to €38 billion annually for 25 EU countries (EC, 2012a) but this figure did not include costs from biodiversity decline, sealing or compaction. More comprehensive estimates in England and Wales put costs at approximately £1.2 billion per year from erosion, compaction, decline in organic matter content, loss of soil biota, diffuse contamination and surface sealing (Defra, 2011).2 As pointed out by the European Commission (EC, 2012a), ‘Soil degradation has a direct impact on water and air quality, biodiversity and climate change.
It can also impair the health of European citizens and threaten food and feed safety’. More recently, the role of soil in storing or releasing carbon (and therefore a direct link with climate change) has been recognised with the launch of the ‘4 per mille’ initiative (to which 17 EU countries have committed) to increase carbon levels in soil by 0.4% per year as part of climate change mitigation strategies. In addition, more knowledge has been gathered on the interaction between soils and diseases (plant, animal and human), adding another dimension to the debate on protecting soils’ useful functions. In view of this increasing emphasis on the multifunctionality of soils, EASAC’s council decided to examine the implications of recent scientific research for integrated policy solutions towards ensuring the sustainability of Europe’s soils.
This project has been guided by an expert group comprising leading scientists of many different disciplines from 20 of EASAC’s academies, led by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, KNAW). Expert group members and their fields of study are shown in Annex 1. EASAC thanks the expert group for their invaluable contribution in identifying the key scientific issues and their potential implications for policy, and thanks the other experts nominated by EASAC academies who contributed during the peer review process.
This report is intended to contribute to discussions and decisions on policy in the European Commission, European Council, European Parliament, as well as national governments, international non-governmental organisations and other stakeholders. After describing the current status and challenges of soils in Europe, the report identifies areas where science interacts with policy within the main themes of biodiversity and soil ecosystem services, the role of soils in aboveground biodiversity conservation, the interactions with agriculture and food quality, soils’ links with human, animal and plant health, and interactions with climate change. We conclude with a detailed discussion of a range of policy issues that emerge from the initial scientific analysis3.
