Protecting our soil: 21 new EU-funded projects to help restore soil health by 2030

Contributing to the EU Mission: ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’ and the European Green Deal objectives, the selected projects gather more than 500 participants from 37 countries. Besides EU Member States, partners come from Horizon Europe associated countries (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Tunisia, Türkiye, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom), but also non-associated (Egypt, Kenya, and Switzerland).

Among these are the first five soil health living lab projects funded under Mission Soil – LivingSoiLL, SOILCRATES, iCOSHELLs, GOV4ALL and LILAS4SOILS. They will contribute directly to the goal of the Mission of setting up 100 living labs to lead the transition to healthy soils by 2030.

What will the projects deliver?

Beyond co-creating solutions for soil health in living labs, including for carbon farming, the new research projects will address a wide variety of soil health challenges across Europe and beyond, such as:

• Help discover the subsoil;
• Improve the modelling of soil pollution processes;
• Develop digital technologies to monitor nutrients and chemical or biological stressors in soil and plants;
• Prevent and combat desertification;
• Develop soil-friendly practices for horticulture;
• Improve spatial planning strategies.

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