Soils have achieved prominence in the political agenda of the European Commission with the proposal for a Soil Monitoring Law and the ambitious Soil Mission research framework. The EU Soil Observatory (EUSO) used the latest state-of-the-art pan-European datasets to propose a preliminary assessment of soil health in the EU based on 18 soil degradation proxy indicators. The body of knowledge will soon be enriched thanks to the investment of 1 billion euros towards the Mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’, which has the ambition to promote the development of new harmonized bottom-up and top-down soil health indicators.

New data and knowledge are also anticipated through the national soil monitoring schemes to support the implementation of the Soil Monitoring Law. We present the Soil Mission roadmap towards assessing and achieving soil health in the EU by 2030 to meet Green Deal objectives. We introduce the EUSO Soil Health Dashboard, a soil degradation indicator tool using soil health indicators developed by the European Soil Data Centre (ESDAC) (2012–2023) that will contribute to Soil Monitoring Law assessments.

The EU Soil Observatory (EUSO) developed the first Soil Health Dashboard.
60-70% of EU soils are affected by one or more soil degradation processes and can be considered unhealthy.
100 Living Labs will promote sustainable land and soil management in urban and rural areas.
The bottom-up mapping will include soil health indicators developed by Soil Mission projects.
Since Plato first observed the effects of land degradation in Greece's formerly lush hills, nearly 2500 years ago, Europe, as other parts of the world, continues to struggle with accelerated soil degradation. Human-induced land degradation is a global threat to food production, climate change and ecosystem services provision.

A recent assessment indicates that 60%–70% of the soils in the European Union (EU) are unhealthy (Veerman, 2023), which means that crop productivity levels and other soil functions like climate and water regulation are impaired. The socioeconomic impact of soil mismanagement is also considerable, with soil erosion alone estimated to cost the global economy $8 billion annually in terms of GDP (Sartori et al., 2019), and impacting poorer countries disproportionately (Borrelli et al., 2017). In contrast, the total cost of land degradation in the EU, and of the decreased provision of ecosystem services caused by it, was estimated at €50 billion per year (SML, 2023).

Over the last two decades, the EU has put in place a number of policies for agro-environmental protection, such as the Soil Thematic Strategy (2006), and for the greening of the Common Agricultural Policy (2013). Since 2020, the EU Green Deal has set an ambitious roadmap to make the EU the first carbon-neutral continent with a modern, competitive and resource-efficient economy (Čavoški, 2020). As part of the EU Green Deal, the EU has ranked soil protection high on the policy agenda. In 2021–2022, the European Commission (EC) adopted the EU Soil Biodiversity Strategy 2030, the Zero Pollution Action Plan and the EU Climate Adaptation Strategy, followed by the proposal for a Soil Monitoring Law (Panagos et al., 2022). In July 2023, the EC proposed the Soil Monitoring Law to put in place a solid and coherent monitoring framework and make sustainable soil management a norm.