How The EU Soil Monitoring Law Misses The Security Picture

Soil plays a fundamental role as it is central to food production, climate regulation, biodiversity and the resilience of ecosystems. Yet, according to the European Commission, 60 to 70 percent of European soils are currently in poor health. A share that could reach 90 percent by 2050 if current trends continue.

In response, the Soil Monitoring Law,  the EU’s first harmonised legal framework dedicated to soils, entered into force in December 2025. While it marks a genuine step forward in data collection and monitoring, it frames soil as a technical and environmental problem rather than a strategic resource. In doing so, it overlooks the systemic risks that soil degradation poses to food security, climate resilience and ecosystem stability. By contrast, the Commission’s June 2025 Communication on Water Resilience explicitly states that “water resilience is a matter of security and crisis preparedness for the EU”, a security framing that soil has not been accorded.

This post examines that gap and argues that soil must be integrated into the EU’s environmental security framework.
Soil as an Environmental Security Issue
An issue only becomes a security priority when it is framed as one. The Solana Report (2008) established that framework for climate change by describing it as a “threat multiplier that exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instabilities”. Soil meets the same criteria across three vectors of systemic risk.

The first is food. According to the FAO, 95 percent of the world’s food is produced on soil. A 2023 joint Communication from the Commission and the High Representative acknowledges that the degradation of arable land constitutes a growing security risk in a context where 90 percent of European soils could be in a degraded state by 2050 and global food demand is projected to rise by 60 percent. Degraded soil therefore creates structural food insecurity.

The second is climate. Soil is the planet’s largest terrestrial carbon sink. According to the IUCN, soils store more carbon than the world’s biomass and atmosphere combined. When soil degrades, it stops sequestering and starts emitting. Land degradation is one of the largest contributors to climate change, having released around two thirds of terrestrial carbon stocks since the nineteenth century. Soil degradation is, in this sense, a multiplier of the threat multiplier: it accelerates precisely the climate change that the Solana Report identifies as the central threat to European security.

The third is natural disasters. Degraded soils absorb less water, amplifying runoff and the severity of floods; their loss of cohesion increases the risk of landslides; their reduced water retention intensifies droughts. A review published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2021) documents this link between soil degradation and heightened vulnerability to extreme events.

These three vectors make soil a systemic security concern, in the very sense the EU now uses that term for water. Yet no European security document frames soil as a strategic resource to be protected as such.

What the Soil Monitoring Law Actually Does
The Soil Monitoring Law, Directive (EU) 2025/2360, is the EU’s first harmonised legal framework dedicated to soils and it is a significant achievement after two decades of legislative vacuum. It establishes a common monitoring system, defines shared soil health descriptors and requires Member States to assess and classify all their territory by 2030. Its preamble acknowledges that soil is “a vital, limited resource and is considered non-renewable and irreplaceable on a human time-scale”.

That progress comes at a cost. The directive imposes no binding restoration targets and no obligations as to outcomes, it is only monitoring and reporting, leaving Member States considerable flexibility in implementation. No dedicated financial mechanism is provided, and there is no mention of strategic resources. Soil degradation costs the EU more than €50 billion per year. The contrast with the Nature Restoration Law, adopted in 2024 with binding ecosystem restoration targets, shows that the EU knows how to set result obligations when it chooses to. The Soil Monitoring Law deliberately falls short.

This choice is not insignificant and can be explained by history. In 2006, the Commission proposed a far more ambitious directive. Five Member States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Austria, formed a blocking minority from 2007 onwards and held it for eight years, until the proposal was formally withdrawn in 2014: the only environmental directive in EU history to have been abandoned outright. A 2017 analysis in Land Use Policy had already shown that EU law protected soil only indirectly, through dispersed and largely non-binding rules, a fragmentation the Soil Monitoring Law has only partially corrected. The current law bears the scars of that political trauma, built on subsidiarity and flexibility specifically to avoid renewed opposition.

That political compromise explains the absence of binding targets. It does not explain the absence of a security framing. JOIN(2023) 19 final, published just weeks before the legislative proposal, explicitly recognises that the degradation of arable land constitutes a security risk for the EU. The two documents coexist without speaking to each other and it is an institutional incoherence the legislature chose not to resolve.

The Security Gap and the Contrast With Other Natural Resources
The contrast between the Soil Monitoring Law and the EU’s treatment of other natural resources reveals a fundamental asymmetry in framing. Water and energy have crossed the threshold of securitisation, they are explicitly treated as strategic resources whose protection is a matter of European security. Soil has not. This is not a question of the severity of the risks involved. It is a question of political construction.

The Water Resilience Strategy (June 2025) states that water resilience is “a matter of security and crisis preparedness for the EU”, the culmination of a gradual securitisation that began with the Solana Report in 2008. REPowerEU (May 2022), triggered within weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, mobilised massive resources under an explicit language of sovereignty and supply security. In both cases, a natural resource was elevated to the rank of strategic priority. No equivalent document exists for soil despite documented systemic risks and a projected irreversible trajectory by 2050.

That framing gap has real consequences. Without security language, soil remains confined to the ordinary environmental agenda, exposed to the political compromises and institutional blockages described above. No dedicated financial mechanism for soil restoration exists whereas the Water Resilience Strategy mobilises over €15 billion through the European Investment Bank and REPowerEU deeply reshaped large parts of EU budget policy. Soil features with difficulty in EU defence or security documents, unlike water and energy.

This invisibility is not accidental. The EU securitises resources effectively when dependence is external and the shock is immediate: Russian gas cut overnight, drought visible on the evening news. It struggles to securitise resources whose degradation is internal, slow and diffuse. Soil degradation is exactly that kind of crisis: silent, incremental and for that reason politically invisible.

The Soil Monitoring Law is a real step forward, but it is a technical advancement that takes place within a strategic vacuum. Knowing that soils are degrading is not enough if that degradation is not constructed as a threat to which the EU must respond with the same urgency it brings to energy dependence or water insecurity.

The instruments exist. The Soil Strategy 2030 could become the vehicle for a security reframing by explicitly articulating its objectives with those of JOIN(2023), which already acknowledges arable land degradation as a security risk. The Water Resilience Strategy of 2025 shows that such a shift is institutionally achievable: the EU made it for water, it can make it for soil.

As long as soil remains something to monitor rather than something to protect, the Soil Monitoring Law will be only what its name says: a monitoring law, not a security law.