Towards a cookbook to evaluate soil threats, soil-based ecosystem services and their associated bundles over scenarios of changes: a first identification of indicators for harmonisation at EU level

2024

47 S.

Serie

40005424

In the last decades, there has been a growing awareness that soils are a vital non-renewable natural resource that provide essential environmental, economic and social benefits to society when they are healthy. At the same time, soils are threatened by human activities and are, for most of them, already degraded. This double observation has led to numerous attempts to assess and map either the threats to soils or the ecosystem services they provide to society. However, most of these assessment or mapping exercises have been developed for a specific threat or services, at a regional to national level and independently of each other so that they differ by various ways and their results are poorly comparable or consistent. Methodologies for assessing soil threats and services must first be harmonized in order to provide a consistent vision across Europe that can be used to implement the European transition towards healthy soils. In that objective, this report provides i) a tiered approach for harmonising at EU level the assessment of STs, SESs and their associated bundles; ii) an explicit procedure to score and rank indicators for soil threats and services according to their “scientific soundness”, their “availability” and their “ability to convey information” and finally iii) an application of the ranking procedure to a first subset of indicators used for assessing soil threats and services at EU level. The developed strategy towards harmonization recognised four successive steps of increasing complexity: i) the harmonisation of the framework and definitions; ii) the harmonisation of the indicators for threats and services; iii) the harmonisation of the models used to assess the selected indicators and iv) the harmonisation of the data used to run the selected models. With regard to the harmonisation of indicators, the selection of indicators is more advanced for soil threats than for soil services, probably due to the longer history in assessing soil threats. In any case, this first application of the developed procedure for selecting and harmonising indicators for soil threats and services and its resulting list of indicators for harmonisation still need to be extended to a larger range of threats and services and to indicators used at national or regional levels.