Research project Towards climate-smart sustainable management of agricultural soils
General introduction
As a local Flemish outcome of ILVO’s participation in EJP SOIL, the European Joint Programme on climate-smart sustainable soil management (2020–2025), an ILVO report has been published summarizing all soil findings relevant to Flanders. The title is “Summary of 5 Years of Research on Climate-Smart Management and Monitoring of Agricultural Soils.” At the European level, the Joint Programme has also succeeded in shaping European decision-making on soil health and resilience through the Soil Monitoring Law and the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Certification Regulation. As a consortium, EJP Soil comprised 26 partners from 24 countries, who joined forces to enable agricultural soils to contribute more to addressing a range of major societal challenges. For Flanders, ILVO was a partner, and the Department of Environment and INBO were linked third parties. The Department of Agriculture & Fisheries chaired the Flemish hub.
Research approach
EJP SOIL was a programme focused on cooperation and knowledge exchange between researchers from 24 participating countries. There was also a strong focus on policy support, both at European and regional level. A roadmap was drafted based on stakeholder consultations via the national hubs, and knowledge gaps were addressed through internal and external calls for projects. The Flemish partners worked on, among other things, an analysis of policy objectives, a database for long-term field experiments, a comparison between national and European monitoring networks, indicators for soil health and ecosystem services, erosion modelling and landscape connectivity, carbon storage in the soil and carbon farming, N2O emissions, soil compaction, measures to make soils more resilient to climate extremes, and sustainable growing media.
Relevance/Valorization
There are now practical knowledge packages and roadmaps available to prevent further soil degradation and help soils adapt to climate change. A key objective was to maintain sustainable agricultural production while also providing ecosystem services, preventing and restoring land and soil degradation, and conserving biodiversity.
