The Soil Monitoring Law between the preparation of the law and the path to national implementation. Reasoning for the Italian case

The Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive represents a crucial step to create a unified legal system for soil protection, addressing its sustainable management and the remediation of contaminated sites, focusing on the ecological, climatic and health importance of soils, their role in biodiversity and carbon storage capacity. The Directive offers margins of autonomy to the Member States to define their monitoring system, the methodologies and threshold values and the parameters to be monitored, in particular on contamination. The contribution aims to provide a framework of the national preparations under the coordination of the Italian Ministry for Environment and Energy Security and identify the main needs for national adaptation.

Soil resilience requires an organic discipline, currently lacking, to address both the adoption of sustainable soil management practices, in harmony with agricultural policy and spatial planning, and land consumption in a systemic way by addressing divergences between local systems.

The transposition of the Directive in Italy requires the introduction of a new regulatory framework, which complements the updating of Legislative Decree no. 152/2006 and other sector regulations, to include a more integrated approach to soil protection, for the purposes of harmonization with national law and a more effective pursuit of the objectives of the Directive.

The approach adopted by Italy on the development of the standard has highlighted the intention to address the issue of soil in an integrated way, offering equal dignity with respect to other environmental resources already regulated.  This involves a commitment to transversality and affirmation of the Directive's ambitious long-term goal of achieving healthy soils by 2050 as a priority in environmental action taking into account pressures on soils, the level of soil degradation and loss of ecosystem services, the assessment and management of risks posed by contaminated sites, soil sealing and removal, and the growth of settlement areas.

The preparations of the legislative process are underway to deal with the transposition, with the first urgencies in particular concerning:

• Ensure strategic guidance and coordination between the Administrations involved that ensures appropriate mechanisms for the adoption of a system of policies and measures to support soil health and resilience based on monitoring and scientific knowledge;
• Ensure the effectiveness of the monitoring system and a sufficient level of harmonization throughout the national territory;
• Identify soil units and determine the number and location of sampling points based on the best available information to reflect the high variability of soil, climatic and environmental characteristics of the national territory;
• Identify the human, instrumental and financial resources needed to implement the Directive;
• Define ways to engage with the public and to provide information at local level on measures and practices to increase soil resilience public participation and to encourage and support landowners and managers to improve soil health and resilience and facilitate such improvements by landowners and managers.