BENCHMARKS

The Mission A Soil deal for Europe, following on from the Mission board Soil Health and Food (SH&F) has set a target of 75% of European soils being healthy or significantly improved by 2030. Measuring the success of public and private sector initiatives to achieve that goal is an essential but hugely complex task. It requires the monitoring of European soils, through a coherent but context-specific monitoring strategy at multiple scales, for multiple land use types, for multiple climates in all EU Member States. BENCHMARKS will build this indicator system with a broad European network and test in 24 European case studies to jointly develop and evaluate a multi-scale (local, landscape, regional and European) and multi-user monitoring framework that is transparent, harmonised and cost-effective for multiple land uses: agricultural, forestry and urban. This will lead to an interactive soil health dashboard for:

1. selection of appropriate soil health indicators
2. soil health assessment
3. recommendation of measures to support soil health

In particular, this project contributes to MMIP B2 (Agricultural soils, reducing nitrous oxide emissions, increasing carbon sequestration), but also to B4 (Increasing carbon sequestration in forests and nature) and B3 (R-education of peat oxidation in peatlands), as it will develop a framework that will be applicable to soil health monitoring in agriculture, forestry and urban areas. Moreover, as the framework will propose indicators for monitoring soil health across multiple ecosystem services, this project will contribute to other policy areas, such as biodiversity and water quality, carbon sequestration in the Netherlands, e.g. Soil, Water Stewardship, and in Europe. BENCHMARKS dovetails with other key European initiatives such as the Green Deal, the EU Soil Health Strategy, the EU Farm to Fork strategy, the upcoming EU Soil Health Law.