Soils provide many ecosystem services, making them a crucial component for a sustainable future and in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). According to the EU Soil Strategy presented by the Commission in 2021, the lack of dedicated EU legislation has been a major factor in the alarming state of EU soils. To address this, the Commission introduced the Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive inJuly 2023. This directive aims to ensure the same level of protection for soils as already exists for water, the marine environment, and air, with the aspirational goal to have all the soils in a healthy condition by 2050, in line with the EU’s Zero Pollution ambition. During this session, scientific and transdisciplinary insights to support soil policies are presented, with a focus on soil health and the importance of soil data. In this session we are looking for contribution that will showcase results that contribute to create future soil health policies or to identify gaps in current legislations. For policy support, design and monitoring, the generation of user-oriented dashboards is crucial, (e.g EUSO soil degradation dashboard). Contributions in this session will address the potential of soil data from local to continental scale, the efforts and challenges carried out by researchersin harmonising soil data across time and space, and how this data can be used for decision support systems in line with the objectives of the EU’s Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive and the broader UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Additionally, speakers will discuss the role of transdisciplinary research, emphasizing how involving various stakeholders can lead to feasible, widely-applicable principles to improve soil management and increase soil resilience.