EU Adopts First-Ever Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive: A New Era for Europe’s Living Soils
The Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive which has officially been approved in the Plenary of the European Parliament, marking a historic milestone in Europe’s environmental policy, now remains to be implemented on the national level by all Member States. This new legislation establishes the first-ever EU-wide framework to systematically monitor, assess, and restore soil health - a critical step toward achieving healthy soils across Europe by 2050. By creating a harmonised monitoring system and a digital soil health data portal, the EU aims to collect comparable data across Member States and guide targeted restoration efforts.
Protecting Europe’s Living Soil
Over 60–70% of soils in the EU are currently degraded, threatening food security, water quality, biodiversity, and climate goals.
The Directive recognises soil as a living ecosystem. It defines soils are healthy when they are in good chemical, physical and biological condition, ensuring that monitoring goes beyond contamination and erosion to include the biological life that underpins soil functions.
Therefore, Member States must now monitor soil biodiversity using DNA metabarcoding of fungi and bacteria. These microbial indicators will be mandatory for at least five percent of sampling sites, serving as a baseline for understanding how life within the soil drives nutrient cycling, carbon storage, and resilience to climate stress.
Still most of Soil Biodiversity is a Missing Piece
While the inclusion of mandatory biological indicators marks progress, the Directive leaves other biological indicators, such as those measuring earthworm, nematode, or arthropod abundance and diversity, as optional. Member States can decide whether to include them based on scientific capacity and national priorities.
This is where SOB4ES steps in
The SOB4ES project, funded under the EU’s Horizon Europe programme, is developing and testing biodiversity indicators, covering a wide range of soil organisms, across Europe’s diverse climates and land uses - from agricultural fields and forests to urban areas and wetlands - and land use intensities. The ultimate goal is to design soil biodiversity indicators to assess ecosystem conditions across various European land uses in a cost-effective manner that capture their sensitivity, resilience, and adaptation to land use changes in different regions.
To help with the implementation of the Directive SOB4ES has produced a handbook of standardised protocols to assess soil biodiversity to unravel the spatial drivers and pressures impacting soil biodiversity communities and their interactions.
To embed ecological insights about soil biodiversity into the lives of Europeans (stakeholders, policymakers, and citizens), SOB4ES will deliver practical, science-based tools that policymakers can use to evaluate and protect soil health.
A SOB4ES policy brief has been produced to provide recommendations on how the soil monitoring could be more effective in protecting soils and it will be followed up by a white paper that could be used as guidance for members states in the implementation of the Directive.