EIP-AGRI seminar: Healthy soils for Europe: sustainable management through knowledge and practice

Call for expression of interest

The EIP-AGRI Seminar ‘'Healthy soils for Europe: sustainable management through knowledge and practice'' will take place on 7-8 October 2020 in Setubal, Portugal.

If you are interested in participating, please complete the application form before 14 May 2020, 23:45 CET


Healthy soils are fundamental to the sustainable production of food, feed and fibre. In addition, healthy soils also provide many other functions that contribute to human well-being such as water filtering, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling and biodiversity preservation. Soil health is affected by unsustainable management practices like frequent tillage, which accelerates soil organic matter loss, incorrect use of agrochemicals which leads to soil and water pollution or irrigation practices causing salinisation problems.

Climate change may also affect soils in different ways. More frequent heavy rainfalls and drought periods can increase erosion, nutrient and pollutant leaching, soil carbon losses and soil salinisation.

On the positive side, practices improving soil health could mitigate or even reverse these negative effects, including the impacts of climate change.

This interactive event is dedicated to identifying, learning from and promoting sustainable soil management practices to maintain soil health.

The overall aim of the seminar is to raise awareness and address practical soil management challenges and solutions to enhance soil health.

The specific objectives of the seminar are:

  1. Raise awareness on the importance of soil health, and various EU initiatives undertaken to maintain and improve it.
  2. Promote and build upon the results and outcomes of past EIP-AGRI networking activities such as Focus Groups on soil-related issues and relevant workshops.
  3. Share experiences and good practices to maintain soil health, identified by relevant projects, research activities and farmers.
  4. Identify synergies between different types of projects working on soil health and encourage further cooperation among participants through networking.
  5. Discuss challenges and solutions for soil health, identify what is needed to make these solutions operational for farmers, foresters and other land managers, and widely used/adopted.
  6. Identify research needs and non-research actions to contribute to the agenda of Horizon Europe’s mission area Soil health and food.

Meer informatie: https://ec.europa.eu/eip/agriculture/en/event/eip-agri-seminar-healthy-s...