Brussels, 22/09/2006 (Agence Europe) - On 22 September, the European Commission unveiled a strategy for ensuring the Europe's soils remain healthy and capable of supporting human activities and ecosystems. Good quality soil is essential to our economic activities as it provides us with food, drinking water, biomass and raw materials - and all our human activities are somehow related to soil. But soil degradation is accelerating across the EU, with negative effects on human health, ecosystems and climate change - and on our economic prosperity and quality of life. Initially scheduled for spring 2005, the new soil strategy had a difficult birth and its publication means that all seven thematic strategies foreseen in the Sixth Environmental Action Programme have now been published. Speaking to reporters, EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said he was delighted with the new EU Soils Strategy, requiring an integrated approach to all sources of soil degradation, and its accompanying framework directive.
The draft directive sets out common principles, objectives and actions. It requires Member States to adopt a systematic approach to identifying and combating soil degradation, tackling precautionary measures and integrating soils protection into other policies. Member States are required to identify areas where there is a risk of erosion, organic matter decline, compaction, salinisation and landslides. They must set risk reduction targets for those areas and establish programmes of measures to achieve them. They will also have to prevent further contamination, establish an inventory of contaminated sites on their territory and draw up national remediation strategies .When a site is being sold, where a potentially contaminating activity has taken or is taking place, a soil status report has to be provided by the seller or the buyer to the administration and the other party in the transaction. Finally, the Member States are required to limit or mitigate the effects of sealing, for instance by rehabilitating brownfield sites.
The Framework Directive allows for flexibility - it is for the Member States to decide the level of ambition, specific targets and the measures to reach those. This is because soil degradation offers a very scattered picture throughout Europe, where 320 major soil types have been identified. Commissioner Dimas said this was the last, but not the least, of the thematic strategies. “Soil is a prime example of the need to think global and act local. That is why we propose a common framework at EU level which will set a level playing field and aim at the same level of protection of soils throughout the EU, while leaving member states room to take into account national situations in their implementation. We want to ensure that citizens today and in the future benefit from soils that are able to perform a wide range of different functions, providing us with all the services that we need”.
Soil degradation has strong impacts on other areas of common interest to the EU, such as water, human health, climate change, nature and biodiversity protection, and food safety. Soil protection is not only a national concern as soil contamination in one Member State can have cross-border effects and cause pollution and economic burdens on neighbouring states. Also, different ways of dealing with soil problems may distort competition for economic operators within the internal market. Soil can be considered a non-renewable resource, as it takes hundreds of years to produce a few centimetres of soil. Yet soil is rapidly degrading in many places across the EU exacerbated by human activity, such as certain agricultural and forestry practices, industrial activities, tourism or urban development. An estimated 115 million hectares or 12% of Europe's total land area are subject to water erosion, and a further 42 million hectares by wind erosion. Approximately 3.5 million sites within the EU could be contaminated. About 45% of European soils have low organic matter content, principally in southern Europe but also other Member States are concerned. Dimas said that various EU policies had already had a beneficial effect on soils, like water protection policy, waste management and the Common Agricultural Policy but this is the first time the EU has adopted an overall, integrated approach combining a series of objectives to monitor and implement soil protection measures. Only nine Member States currently have soil protection legislation, most of which covers a specific risk, like contamination. Asked about the cost of implementing the new strategy, Dimas said that the Commission had an impact assessment study looking at various scenarios. The biggest cost, he said, would be doing nothing, which would cost around EUR 38 billion.