Addressing soil erosion in Europe: proceedings of the SCAPE workshop in Alicante, Spain, June 2003

✍ Scribed by A. C. Imeson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 46 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1085-3278
• DOI: 10.1002/ldr.704

✦ Synopsis

This is an important time for soil conservation and protection in Europe, as the European community is in the process of formulating a soil-protection strategy. The first step was the publication of a Soil Strategy paper by DG-ENV (2002) that identified six major threats to both the soil and the landscape. These included threats associated with soil erosion, soil compaction, salinity, contamination and organic matter. The second phase involved establishing a European Soil Forum in April 2003 with a mandate to set up working and technical groups to look at these threats as well as a number of other cross-cutting issues such as soil monitoring and research. The working groups produced several thousand pages of documents that can be downloaded from the European Union (EU) Circa Soil Policy website (http:// forum.europa.eu.int/Public/irc/env/soil/home) or obtained from the Joint Research Centre. Each report was structured according to the DPSIR framework (see later) promoted by the European Environment Agency and other organizations for reporting on indicators. Now, the findings of this research have to be translated into a soilconservation policy that may or may not result in a soil-protection directive. Soil threats were considered in terms of the Drivers, Pressures, State, Impacts and Responses (DPSIR) in order to