Soil Health governance: tools and methods to enhance soil literacy and facilitate the decision making processes
2025-04-08, 14:00–14:45, Expert Room 7

About 60% of European soils are currently polluted, contaminated, or in many ways compromised by centuries of urbanisation, industrial and rural development, and careless waste management. The EU Mission Soil, the EU Soil Observatory, the Soil Strategy and the Soil Monitoring Law represent a soild european basis to counteract such a negative evidence and trend. However, the issue of soil health - on top of its global relevance and urgency - also embeds a deep local meaning, in that it interferes in many respects with land destination and use regulations, practices and interests – therefore with spatial planning and governance decisions that are peculiar to local and regional policy and administrations. In this context is necessary the establishment of constructive dialogues among public authority representatives, academia, citizens, businesses, associations and other Quadruple Helix stakeholders to help policy makers to understand the problems of their soils and find viable solutions together. During the SOIL HEALTH NOW! workshop the participants will simulate the undertaking of all necessary steps to reintroduce soil related issues into the political agendas as priorities in a respectful, constructive and transformative manner. The workshop will present the instruments and use the tools developed by the HuMUS project and others Mission Soil projects and beyond, to facilitate the dialogue and the decision making processes on soil health.

Annalaura has a background on Environmental Science, and gained experience in European projects coordination. She has experimented activities involving citizens, academia and institutions through participatory methods and tools.
Annalaura is project officer at the National Association of Italian Municipalities of Tuscany (ANCI Toscana), lead partner of the HuMUS - Healthy Municipal Soils project, funded by the Horizon Europe programme within the Mission Soil.