This Think Tank (TT) focuses specifically on specific objective 7 of the European soil mission: to reduce the EU global footprint on soils. Within this specific objective, two main targets are defined in the Soil Mission Implementation Plan:

T 7.1: Establish the EU’s global soil footprint in line with international standards

T 7.2: The impact of EU’s food, timber and biomass imports on land degradation elsewhere is significantly reduced without creating trade-offs

Background to the international dimension (as presented in the Soil Mission Implementation Plan)

This specific mission objective adds the international dimension to the other mission objectives, which are almost entirely focused on improving soil health and soil functioning in the European Union. As stated in the Mission Implementation Plan, soil health is crucial for three UN conventions (UNCBD, UNCCD, UNFCCC), as well as for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, the soil health concept should be aligned globally, reducing also the soil footprint outside the EU from food, biomass and timber imports (as stated later, we do not agree with this strong focus on biomass solely). In the soil mission implementation plan, following beyond-EU dimension is already strongly highlighted.

In Africa, the Soil Mission aims to collaborate through the FNSSA partnership, part of the EU-Africa Union High-Level Policy Dialogue. This partnership focuses on soil health for sustainable food systems. Projects like Soils4Africa and LEAP4FNSSA should be used to unify international monitoring approaches, to develop capacities, and to spot investment opportunities in soil health.

For countries around the Mediterranean, we highlight the PRIMA partnership, that addresses water and agri-food systems in the Mediterranean, preventing further degradation and restoring damaged lands in the Southern Mediterranean.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, cooperation is meant to be focused under the EU-CELAC partnership, that specifically emphasizes sustainable agriculture and bioeconomy research in line with the EU's Horizon Europe program.

Japan and Canada are also key partners. Japan seeks to align its Moonshot program with the EU's Soil mission, while Canada contributes to designing living labs and seeks further R&I collaboration.

The mission also aims to support collaboration with the FAO, particularly its Global Soil Partnership, benefiting from a harmonized framework for soil data and contributing to the FAO's Global Soil Biodiversity Observatory and initiatives on soil biodiversity conservation.

Finally, the mission states that Member States' involvement in the 4per1000 initiative, launched at COP 21, aims to establish an International Research Consortium (IRC) on soil and carbon to guide global R&I cooperation. This will be guided by the activities of the ORCaSa Horizon Europe project, and aligns with the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases.

The state-of-the-art for mission objective 7, and on achieving its targets, is not straightforward to assess or summarize, especially since, to our knowledge, no current overarching research efforts have been made to begin to quantify the detailed impact of EU activities on soil health and soil functions worldwide. There is also no clear indication to what soil functions should be prioritized.

The Soil deal for Europe acknowledges that even in EU soils, it is difficult to assess an overall status of soil health. A key obstacle to EU-wide quantification of soil health is the lack of systematic and harmonized soil monitoring across member states. Unlike other resources such as water, there is no legal requirement for EU member states to report on soils. This results in varying levels of soil monitoring and hinders the ability to effectively monitor and report on the health of European soils. This is testimony to the formidable task that is ahead for achieving soil mission objective 7, which actually brings together all EU-based mission objectives in one objective for outside EU, with all related harmonization and integration issues, into one worldwide perspective.

Although overarching efforts to begin to quantify EU impact on soils outside EU are absent, this does not imply there are no current research studies that have tried to partly attribute the impact of EU policy and actions on soils, or rather soil footprint, outside of the EU. We here present some recent efforts that have aimed at identifying emerging trends and technologies that can help in establishing the soil footprint, as well as providing novel perspectives and future directions. We also identify key databases that offer the potential for assessing EU global soil footprint.

Representative papers on establishment of global ecological footprint of the EU-food system

The ecological footprint (EF) of the EU-27 between 2004 and 2014, and how it exceeded regional biocapacity, was assessed by Galli et al. (2023). The study used an extended multi-regional input–output approach (MRIO), highlighting food as a major contributor. The MRIO approach can analyse the ecological footprint (EF) and, as part of the EF, the food footprint (FF) of a region, considering both the demand and supply aspects, including trade and multiple externalities. Vanham et al. (2023) performed a similar approach, to track the land footprint (LF) and water footprint (WF) of food consumption in the EU. The EU LF and WF were estimated at 140-222 Mha yr⁻¹ and 569-918 km³ yr⁻¹, constituting 5-7% of global agricultural LF and 6-10% of global agricultural WF. The study also underlined the importance of a consistent methodology, since numbers actually differed strongly from similar earlier efforts.

Giljum et al. (2016) identified priority areas for European resource policies using a similar MRIO-based footprint assessment, presenting a comprehensive assessment of the EU from 1995 to 2011. Again utilizing MRIO modelling, developed with EXIOBASE (an MRIO database), the study revealed a significant shift in the origin of raw materials, with the share extracted within the EU falling from 68% in 1995 to 35% in 2011. Materials extracted in China equalled the share of EU's own material extraction by 2011.

Bruckner et al. (2019) performed a global cropland footprint of the EU’s non-food bioeconomy. A novel hybrid land flow accounting model, combining LANDFLOW with EXIOBASE, was employed to provide detailed insights into product and country-specific footprint. The study revealed that two-thirds of the cropland required for the EU’s non-food biomass consumption is located outside the EU, particularly in China, the US, and Indonesia, Notably, oilseeds for biofuels, detergents, and polymers represent the dominant share (39%) of the EU's non-food cropland demand.

Some key papers on country-specific assessment

Cederberg et al. 2019 focused on the environmental impacts of Swedish food consumption, specifically in relation to agrochemicals, greenhouse gas emissions and land impacts. Equally utilizing the EXIOBASE database, the research calculated novel footprint indicators for pesticides and antimicrobial veterinary medicines. Key findings revealed that a significant share of Sweden's pesticide footprint is embedded in imports, primarily from Europe and Latin America. Kalt et al. (2021) performed an analysis tracing Austria’s biomass consumption to source countries, using a physical consumption-based accounting approach, combined with national statistics and process chain modelling. 55% of Austria’s total biomass consumption originated from domestic forestry or agriculture, and 30% from neighbouring countries. Products with the largest biomass footprints like beef, pork, milk, cereal products, paper, and wood fuels were primarily sourced from Central Europe. Biomass from non-EU countries accounted for about 8% of Austria's primary biomass footprint.

Habitat loss and agricultural trade

Schwarzmueller and Kastner 2022 performed a study that linked agricultural trade to global loss of species. Utilizing FAOSTAT data and the Species Habitat Index (SHI) as a measure of ecosystem intactness, the research covered trade flows between 223 countries over 15 years. It showed agricultural expansion as a major driver of biodiversity loss, especially in South America, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, also showing that Western Europe, North America, and the Middle East have significant biodiversity footprints outside their borders. Particular attention was paid to soybeans, palm oil, and cocoa. The authors indicate also the limitations of their study: "directly relating the species habitat loss to the production of agricultural products, we neglected potential other driverslike logging or mining. Although agricultural expansion is by far the most widespread form of land-cover change , this introduces some uncertainty when these products are traded between different countries."

Overarching conclusion

The state-of-the-art analysis shows that the MRIO approach might be a good starting point for analysing and quantifying the food, feed and timber exchange between the EU and third countries. A key challenge will lie in relating this mostly land cover-based assessments of footprint, to soil health and soil functioning. A good starting point here will be to rely on databases for soil properties, for which key potential examples currently available are summarized below:

www.isric.org

This database provides digitized soil survey information from around the world

https://www.fao.org/global-soil-partnership/regional-partnerships/en/

The Regional Soil Partnerships (RSPs) link up different national soil entities (soil survey institutions, soil management institutions, soil research institutions and soil scientists working in land resources, climate change and biodiversity institutions/programmes), and could be a good starting point for local data for soil functioning assessment.

https://www.footprintnetwork.org/resources/mrio/

Key database for MRIO modelling

https://data.footprintnetwork.org/#/

This database provides e.g. potential footprints by land type and socio-economic worldwide relations.

Based on the state-of-the-art, it becomes clear why the mission objective 7’s first sub-objective is focused on establishing a clear baseline for establishing EU’s global soil footprint in line with international standards. Current state-of-the-art has only started performing this exercise at large scale, linking trade exchanges to land use but not to specific ecosystem soil functions and related soil services. Still, it is clear that, based on current knowledge, it should be possible to already establish key policy actions that can already be taken now, to reduce EU global footprint. As emphasized by van der Putten et al. 2023, soil health laws should account for global soil connections.

This section relates to the key knowledge gaps, as they were identified during the preparatory meetings in advance of the Barcelona SOLO meeting, and as they were further discussed in Barcelona. For some key knowledge gaps, a potential way forward was already indicated in the SOLO meeting in Barcelona, and we briefly relate to the outcomes, as we do wish to reflect the strong and valuable interactions with the stakeholders. This document is mainly intended to summarize the knowledge gaps: potential pathways forward should therefore be treated merely as openings for discussion.

KG1 Narrow focus on biomass

Some background: This first knowledge gap stems from the narrow focus for the EU global footprint on biomass, food and timber in the current Soil Mission Implementation Plan. Semantically, it might thus not be considered a knowledge gap, but by ignoring it, a strong knowledge gap could persist in the future, because a major part of the potential footprint of EU actions on soils worldwide is ignored.

Multiple stakeholders placed a strong remark regarding the clarity of the actual goal of this mission objective. It is not clear why this is limited to biomass. If one would take this definition strictly, land degradation from industrial soil contamination (importing other products) and from open mining importing mineral resources will not be taken into account. Still, these can have a profound impact on global soils. In the Implementation Plan, it is indicated that “a first baseline has to be created by mission activities, with specific focus on food, feed and fibre imports leading to land degradation and deforestation.” A key point raised by multiple members of the Think Tank, is that the focus on biomass imports is too narrow to allow to make a baseline for global footprint on soils of EU actions. If this is the goal, the objective should be renamed as ‘reduce the impact of EU food, feed and fibre imports on non-EU Soils’.

Potential path forward: it was suggested to focus on a broader definition in the mission objective, so that full impact can be assessed, and future suggested policy actions should include non-biomass and non-food related soil footprint (pesticides, (open) mining development, infrastructure building for e.g. tourism, climate change impacts, ...). Equally, it might be worthwhile to consider to include the impact of export of soil amendments (e.g. herbicides, pesticides) from the EU on soils outside the European Union.

KG2: There is no standard soil foot printing methodology

As already emphasized in the state-of-the-art and background, the Soil deal for Europe mission acknowledges that even in EU soils, it is difficult to assess an overall status of soil health. A key obstacle to EU-wide quantification of soil health is the lack of systematic and harmonized soil monitoring across member states. Unlike other resources such as water, there is no legal requirement for EU member states to report on soils. This results in varying levels of soil monitoring and hinders the ability to effectively monitor and report on the health of European soils. This is testimony to the formidable task that is ahead for achieving soil mission objective 7, which brings together all EU-based mission objectives, with all related harmonization and integration issues, into one worldwide perspective.

During the Barcelona SOLO meeting, a LULUCF based CO2-emission tracking methodology was proposed as a potential action. This would start from considering different categories of land use, e.g. forests, croplands, grasslands, wetlands, settlements, each with a different impact on soil health and soil functioning related variables, and each with a standard indicative value for a specific soil ecosystem service. The latter could be based on multiple tiers for detail, depending on availability of data for a certain region. Based on land use change tracking, changes in soil functioning can thus be assessed, and a footprint can be associated to it. A MRIO based analysis as described earlier in the SOTA, can be used for linking local land-use changes to global production and consumption patterns, and in particular for linking impact to EU action. We stress that this potential solutions is only listed preliminary here. It will be up to future innovations action to actually resolve the issues in detail.

A key path foward here is the development of global sustainability metrics for use by farmers and businesses (food supply chain, banks etc.) or a harmonised development of on-farm soil assessment methodologies (for use by farmers, governments, food supply chain and water businesses). Here, it would be possible to build on the efforts on sustainability and true cost calculations (including impact on health and environment) by the Sustainable Food Trust. The need for developing such 'gold standards' for healthy soils is also emphasized in van der Putten et al. 2023.

KG3: Trade-offs between soil impacts

As the outside EU foot printing mission target heaps together different soil impacts into one assessment, unlike the mission objectives oriented towards the within EU-27 soils, a new challenge will arise, with trade-offs between regional impacts and between different key focal impact areas, e.g. carbon sequestraton and biodiversity. Even if a clear baseline for some functions is established, there will always be trade-offs with other functions (Zwetsloot et al. 2020). A sound methodology for assessing these trade-offs will have to be defined, maximizing synergies and potentially prioritizing certain soil functions in certain areas, based on clear criteria.

In the SOLO meeting in Barcelona, multiple stakeholders discussed key soil functions to focus on, as efficient assessment will require focus. The suggested key focus impacts are: GHG-emissions and soil carbon sequestration, soil biodiversity, soil structure (linked to soil erosion), water system health and pollution and pesticides/herbicides impact, soil nutrient status. We stress this was just the first expert opinion, based on expert discussions during the meeting. It is up to future actions to decide on the key functions and impacts to be assessed.

KG 4: Scale issues

Data availability is mostly regional and not EU-specific. How to move from case studies to a baseline for global EU impact? How to link the changes in soil to EU policy and actions, and how to distinguish impact from other local and global impacts? Here is also a matter of scale: at which scale will it be possible to define the impact/EU action relation?

During the Barcelona SOLO meeting, it was proposed to initially focus on key trade regions and key crops and agricultural products to better understand the potential solutions to these scale issues:

Key crops: timber, cocoa, soy, coffee, cattle, oil palm and rubber

Key regions (because of in-place or in-development trade agreements): Brazil, African Union, Vietnam, New Zealand, Indonesia, Canada

KG5: Impact of local and broader outside EU policy and soil governance

The EU footprint, and any actions related to reducing it, will also be impacted and interacting with local policy actions. This might complicate both the definition of potential EU remediation actions to be taken, and of footprint establishment. It will be key to carefully map and take into account local policy when defining EU actions.

KG6: Potential benefit of the use of new bio-technology, as well as agro-ecological approaches

Multiple stakeholders mentioned that there is a key knowledge gap regarding the potential of new bio-technology and agro-ecological approaches to lower the footprint of EU food import. This should include changes that EU can implement within its own food system to reduce its dependence on outside EU food sources. This can include e.g. microbial tools (Batista and Singh 2021) and agro-ecology innovation (Hawes et al. 2021).

KG7: Link to other soil mission objectives

Again, the last key knowledge gap is more of a potential future key knowledge gap than a current key knowledge gap. But, should it not be taken into account, strong incompatibilities between this specific mission objectives, and mission objectives targeted to within EU action could arise. Other mission objectives focus on EU soils mostly, without having to consider global impacts. Risk of EU solutions with footprint abroad is strong. We need to include actions taken in other mission objectives in a footprint analysis. How to achieve this is currently unclear. Yet, it is clear that the outside-EU footprint objective needs to become an essential part of the soil conversations in Europe. Mechanisms need to be developed to implement the footprint analyses in EU soil policy.

Process for document preparation

We have organized several meetings with the different key stakeholders involved in drafting the document.

04/07/2023: AM, online TEAMS

Present: Michael Obersteiner, Isabelle Verbeke, Dries Roobroeck, Ivan Janssens, Eric Struyf, Jessica Donham, Peter Laszlo

05/07/2023: AM, online ZOOM

Present: Orsolya Nyárai, Detlef Gerdts, Ivan Janssens, Eric Struyf

Outcome: Get to know, planning and governance of the TT.

Discussion on key issues, challenges and opportunities that all stakeholders and TT participants identify regarding the overall objective.

23/11/2023: AM, online TEAMS

Present: Michael Obersteiner, Dries Roobroeck, Eric Struyf, Vincent Dauby, Peter Laszlo, Orsolya Nyárai, Detlef Gerdts, Mirco Barbero

Outcome: Preparation of roadmap and scoping document for Barcelona meeting, to ensure effective discussions.

5/12/2023, 6/12/2023

Intensive discussion with stakeholders for this TT (present: Detlef Gerdts, Orsolya Nyárai, Eric Struyf, Vincent Dauby) and other TT on the linkages of the mission objective to other mission goals, and identification of key challenges and knowledge gaps associated to achieving the mission objectives.

Within SOLO, all TT documents will eventually be compiled into a roadmap (Table 1). For this purpose, a standard table was constructed, which is uniform across all Think Tanks, and is a summary of above section.

We acknowledge all stakeholders present in Barcelona, and all people involved in SOLO but not directly in the TT for their valuable input during the Barcelona meeting.