Brussels, 27.01.22. More than 400 km² of land in the EU are converted into settlement and transport areas every year, mainly agricultural land. ÖDP MEP Manuela Ripa addresses the EU Commission during a meeting of the Environment Committee - the five Horizon Europe missions are on the agenda: "I am very pleased that there is an EU mission on soil health. This is exactly what some of my colleagues and I have been campaigning for. What I wanted to know from the Commission was what exactly the 100 test laboratories and lighthouse projects envisaged by the EU would look like in order to restore the health of our soils. The fight against the dramatic sealing of land must be right at the top of the agenda," Ripa pointed out during the soil mission.

The missions are a central component of the EU's Horizon Europe research framework program and comprise concrete measures - from research projects to legislative projects - to tackle the greatest challenges of our time. Mission number 5 on soil health and food aims to ensure that at least three quarters of all soils in the EU are healthy again by 2030. This should enable Europe to continue to provide essential ecosystem services to ensure healthy food and a healthy natural environment for its population.

"Sealing, desertification, erosion, over-fertilization and pesticide contamination are among the main reasons why our soils are in such a bad state," Manuela Ripa points out the threatening condition of European soils. In April last year, the European Parliament therefore called on the EU Commission in a motion for a resolution to submit a legislative proposal for the preservation of healthy soils. The EU Commission complied with this request.

"In view of the rapid progression of climate change and the loss of our biodiversity, the Horizon Europe mission for soil health and food should be one of the Commission's top priorities. In order to achieve the goal of restoring our soils to a healthy state by 2030, concrete actions are needed in particular to sustainably stop the sealing of land across Europe - the destruction of soil," Ripa summarizes her demand to the EU Commission. "Because without healthy soils, we will certainly not achieve the climate targets of the European Green Deal."