Empowering soil health in Mediterranean environments through collaborative stakeholder engagement: insights from Sardinian Living Lab of the InBestSoil project

Preserving soil health and enhancing the ecosystem services that soil produces is of primary importance in European strategies and policies. More than 60% of the European soils are unhealthy due to unsustainable land use, pollution, climate change, and extreme events. This causes loss of ecosystem services, costing the EU at least €50 billion annually. Collaboration among businesses, policymakers, public administration, and the scientific community is crucial to develop practices that recognize the essential role of soils in sustaining livelihoods, biodiversity, and climate regulation.

In this framework, the Horizon Europe funded project InBestSoil (https://inbestsoil.eu/) aims to co-create a framework for investments in soil health preservation and restoration by developing a system for the economic valuation of the ecosystem services provided by healthy soil and the impacts of soil interventions, and its incorporation into business models and incentives. To achieve this, InBestSoil has selected 7 existing Soil Health Lighthouses (LHs) and 2 Soil Health Living Labs (LLs, in different maturity stages) covering four land uses (agricultural, forestry, urban, mining) across four biogeographic regions over Europe. The LLs are collaborative initiatives focused on co-creating knowledge and innovations, while LHs represent individual sites known for exemplary performance. The LL1, located in Sardinia (Italy), is coordinated by the CMCC Foundation and Agris Sardegna Research Agency. It focuses on Mediterranean agricultural soils and aims addressing the challenges related to climate change and extreme events, soil pollution, land abandonment, and water scarcity. It includes 2 LHs on conservation agriculture managed by Agris and 9 Living Lab Experimental Sites (LLES), which evaluate the introduction of sustainable soil practices. The LHs included in the LL are two Long-Term Experiments (>20 years) on conservation agriculture (reduced and no tillage versus conventional tillage) on durum wheat in rotation with legumes, in soils with different fertility levels that are representative of Mediterranean cereal farming conditions. Conservation agriculture is among the most promising climate-smart agricultural practices because it contributes to both climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives while helping to maintain and increase farmers' incomes. However, it is important both to acquire additional information to assess the medium- to long-term effects of these practices in different environments and cropping systems as well as to disseminate the scientific evidence and support the wider application of these practices in the Mediterranean region.

The LHs aim to provide scientific evidence and disseminate knowledge and experience gained in the long-term application of conservation agriculture in Mediterranean agricultural systems.  Moreover, in the selected 9 LLES, located in different areas and including cereal, olive tree and vineyard farms, soil samplings and analyses are being conducted to measure soil indicators and provide information to assess the economic evaluation of ecosystem services provided by soils managed with sustainable agricultural practices, primarily including conservation agriculture.

We aim to create a permanent space of discussion on the topic of soil health, involving all relevant actors, from farmers to researchers to policy makers, in order to identify common solutions and innovations that can face the economic and environmental challenges the Mediterranean agriculture is facing.