(Re-)thinking soil law across spatial and temporal scales

According to the most recent approximations, soil is home to 59% of species on Earth, including everything from microbes to mammals, making it the singular most biodiverse habitat on Earth. This biodiversity is the basis of all terrestrial food systems. However, unlike other habitats, soil biodiversity is barely protected through legal frameworks, and current design of our legal systems is poorly equipped to deal with the scientific reality of soil system functioning. This raises the question, how can we make soils visible before the law and enhance their protection?

Project description

Soil biodiversity is barely protected through existing legal frameworks, and current design of our legal systems is poorly equipped to deal with the scientific reality of soil system functioning. At a spatial scale, for instance, legal protection of private property and land tenure acts as a barrier to preserve soil ecosystem services at a landscape scale. At a temporal scale, legal focus on providing remedies after soils have been polluted or degraded is ill suited to deal with the fact that it takes minutes to pollute healthy soils, but thousands or ten-thousands of years for healthy soils to develop.

Building on existing efforts to bridge soil science and legal disciplines within the context of the WUR Soil Taskforce, this initiative serves to expand and deepen shared learning efforts within the taskforce to (re-)think what effective soil laws could look like in light of recent advances in soil science. The importance of this endeavor is particularly tangible in light of the efforts to legally anchor the protection of soils at the EU level through the proposal for a Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience, as well as the UN’s FAO’s efforts in mapping and analyzing soil laws at a global level through their ‘Soil-lex’.

By uncovering the current challenges in effective soil governance through a series of interactive, in-depth workshops among experts, our objective is to both identify mismatches between how law operates and how soils function, as well as set the first steps towards developing principles to overcome such challenges. This endeavour will not only pinpoint current gaps but also envisage new perspectives for the future, proposing evidence-based arguments about the appropriate scales for soil-related laws and policies. The synthesis of our findings will culminate in an agenda-setting scientific article, offering insights into the past, present, and future of soil science-supported soil health laws, along with an accessible booklet that serves to open up this debate across and between scientific, policy and civil society communities to promote mutual learning and discussion in favor of evidence-based future legislation.