Preprint
Article

Critical analysis of Portuguese and European Union soil legislation based on information available in the SoiLEX database

This version is not peer-reviewed.

Submitted:

26 January 2025

Posted:

04 February 2025

You are already at the latest version

Abstract
The European Green Deal pursues to make Europe the world's first carbon-neutral continent, and United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15 seeks neutrality towards land degradation. Soil requires adequate protection and preservation, being a depletable natural resource, which, is relevant to move its management to an environmentally conscious framework. Soil supplies food regulates water and nutrient cycles, and healthy soils store carbon. Its ecosystem services are under pressure, making it difficult to maintain its health and preserve biodiversity. Despite existing legal instruments, soil degradation is on ascent and mostly addressed indirectly in the EU governance measures, without yet one harmonized soil legislation. The aim of this study is to carry out a critical analysis of Portuguese and European Union soil legislation, based on the information available in the SoiLEX database. In this way, it proposes to verify the contributions of that legislation to the soil, regarding, particularly, soils threats that are listed at this database. Subsequently, a SWOT analysis was carried out for each soil legislation, and it was found that there are more Portuguese legislative acts that make indirect reference to the threats of soil, and none reference to soil acidification or, in vague mode, to soil salinization. European Union legislative acts, makes more direct reference to the SoiLEX database threats of soil, but it still does indirect reference to some soil threats. There aren´t any direct or indirect reference to salinization, compaction and acidification of soil. All those “invisible threats” should be directly referred at the new soil directive to be done.
Keywords: 
Soil threats; SWOT analysis; Suggestions and proposals
Subject: 
Social Sciences  -   Geography, Planning and Development
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.

Altmetrics

Downloads

20

Views

24

Comments

0

Subscription

Notify me about updates to this article or when a peer-reviewed version is published.

Email

Prerpints.org logo

Preprints.org is a free preprint server supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

Subscribe

© 2025 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated