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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors:	Farina, Roberta, Di Bene, Claudia, Marchetti, Alessandro, Piccini, Chiara, Vanino, Silvia
Format:	Recurso digital
Language:	English
Published:	Zenodo 2021
Online Access:	https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12701363
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Table of Contents:

The European Joint Program SOIL: “Towards climate-smart sustainable management of agricultural  soils” (EJP-SOIL) aims at building a sustainable European integrated research system on agricultural  soils, at promoting a climate-smart sustainable agricultural soil management, and at enabling an  environment that will maximize the contribution of agricultural soil to key societal challenges such as  food and water security, climate change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity preservation and  human health. This report describes the work performed within the EJP-SOIL, WP2 task 2.3 Identification of barriers  and opportunities by scenario development aiming at quantifying the current opportunities and  barriers for soil knowledge (development, sharing and transfer, harmonization and storage, and  application) to overcome the soil challenges in Europe, in the opinion of the stakeholders. The study  involved 20 Countries and harvested the stakeholders’ perception about knowledge and knowledge  requirements related to the soil challenges, through national surveys. National results were collated and harmonized in a common database before the analyses. According to stakeholders’ perception on the most relevant soil challenges that research should  address were “improving soil organic matter” for the Geographical Zones (GZs) of Northern, Western, and Central European “improving water storage capacity” in Southern Europe. The main results showed that there are many areas of improvement of the soil knowledge sector as a  whole, both by removing barriers and by enhancing opportunities to overcome soil challenges. Among  the barriers, the stakeholders have indicated in detail the technical, cultural, organizational,  legal/institutional, economic, and political obstacles, that hinder the exploitation of research efforts to solve soil-related issues. Among these are: the lack of funding for research and long-term  experiments, low investments in education, a scarce relationship between researchers and other  actors, the lack of knowledge networks and national infrastructure linked to those operating at  European level, and the need to develop regional tailored soil management strategies. The EJP SOIL already addresses some the identified issues, e.g,. by inventorying long-term experiments  on sustainable management of agricultural soils, promoting their use and visibility (T7.3, T7.4, WP3),  and favouring the creation of multi-actors and multi-disciplinary networks at national and European  level. Concerning the need to develop regional tailored soil management strategies, the EJP SOIL  makes use of the diversity of its partners within internal research projects, to consider the diversity of  pedoclimatic conditions, specifically addressing organic vs mineral soils. Identified opportunities ranged from the increase of financial resources for research, to be allocated  mainly in multi- and trans-disciplinary research, to the creation of science-policy-society networks, improving communication among researchers and other soil stakeholders, creation of national  infrastructures, encompassing databases created with standardised and harmonised methodologies  at the European level using new ICT tools. The EJP SOIL includes the formation of young scientists in  WP5, that will be targeted specifically on some of these issues.  Another important aspect outlined by respondents, concerns the transfer of the research outputs to  agricultural soil managers, that should be based on the development of region-specific soil  management strategies supported by appropriate policies and incentives. Some of the suggestions  that came from the questionnaires will be specifically faced by the EJP SOIL WP8 Science to policy  interaction.  The output of this research allows to identify in detail all those factors that should be removed to  address the challenges of soil, but, at the same time, the immense opportunities listed by respondents,  that implicitly enclose a “wish list” of how knowledge could contribute to tackle the soil challenges.  Hence, the highlighted elements can be viewed as an agenda of what needs to be done or avoided by  soil stakeholders (scientists, farmers and farmer organisations, agro-industry and policy makers) to  make soil research effective and responsive to the needs of soil conservation and sustainable  development of the whole society.

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