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Spatial Planning and Design with Soil

Project description

Growing healthy soil through innovative spatial planning

Soil health in Europe is under increasing pressure from climate change and land degradation, threatening its ability to provide essential ecosystem services. In this context, the EU-funded SPADES project will develop soil-inclusive spatial planning strategies. By working with local practitioners and policymakers across 10 Member States, SPADES aims to enhance current soil practices through 17 pilot projects that encompass diverse land uses. The project will produce integrative tools and methodologies, fostering collaboration between the planning and soil sectors. Additionally, SPADES emphasises soil literacy through capacity-building initiatives to engage various stakeholders. By prioritising soil care in spatial planning, SPADES seeks to ensure a healthier environment for future generations while addressing societal needs.

Objective

SPADES’ mission is to develop, test and implement soil-inclusive spatial planning strategies to support the transition towards soil health in Europe. Soil health is highly under pressure and the soil’s ability to perform essential ecosystem services should be improved to cope with pressures such as climate change and need such as a healthy living environment. Spatial planning and design are practices that, when enriched by soil care, can enhance the current status of soils and support societal challenges and needs, while avoiding unwanted trade-offs towards other areas, generations or functions. SPADES will therefor provide a comprehensive state of the art on both planning and design practices, as on soil instruments. To be able to make a transition in spatial planning and design towards healthy soils a fundamental understanding of the current mechanisms is key. SPADES will develop integrative instruments and improve the information basis and brokerage to bring the spatial planning and design field and soil sector together. This will contribute to the methodological basis. SPADES will work in 17 pilots in 10 member states, covering a broad range of land uses (urban, peri-urban and rural areas), time and spatial scales, and soil and planning challenges. This is done together with local practitioners and policy makers to develop fit-for-purpose soil-inclusive spatial strategies to support different goals such as land degradation neutrality and no net land take. The SPADES instruments will be presented in such a way (manual and navigator) so that they can be found by the right user, at the right phase of the planning and design process, and for the right purpose. SPADES supports soil literacy (by capacity building and communication, dissemination and exploitation activities) to a broad range of target groups to enable current practice to improve. To make this most effective, SPADES case partners are involved in these CDE and training activities.

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Programme(s)

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Funding Scheme

HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MISS-2023-SOIL-01

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Coordinator

STICHTING DELTARES
Net EU contribution
€ 968 690,00
Total cost
€ 968 690,00

Participants (19)

Partners (1)