Two Meetings About Soil Health in 1 Week: Momentum Grows for Soil Action
Soils are high on the agenda within Europe with the (most likely) upcoming Soil Monitoring Law (SML), but also in the Netherlands with different national programs such as the National Strategy on Spatial Planning and the Environment, Water and Soil-based planning and the upcoming National programme Soil Subsurface and Groundwater. Municipalities and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management are teaming up with research organisations to exchange information and setup collaborations.
What we noticed is that:
- Many early career professionals have taken up the concern for healthy soils and have become active to support a healthy future in our living environment.
- There are top down initiatives such as the SML and more fundamental and strategic research agendas and bottom up initiatives from municipalities with more applied (research) needs, that are not yet connected at the scale, level of detail and needs / objectives.
- A lot of initiatives have started (nationally and European) but there is a need for central coordination so that we can learn from each other, share data and not all have to start from scratch.
- For urban soils, we still have a lot of (literal) blank spots. Applied knowledge for practice and policy is urgently needed. What are concrete perspectives to act and what can be improved on a short term basis? Addressing current problems is most urgent.
- We need to connect with other fields outside the soil world. We have to avoid silo-thinking and connect with water, biodiversity, spatial planning and design and social and economic sciences to improve soil health in a feasible way.
The networks are being setup. The next step is to go from connecting, to exchanging and actual collaboration.
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