SOILS4MED shares the vision that in the Mediterranean region there is urgent need to enhance availability and use of soil data and information and to harmonize methods towards standardized soil information systems, as enabling conditions to protect and improve soil health and support policies to achieve land degradation neutrality and other Sustainable Development Goals (food security, climate change, biodiversity, economic development).
Soil is one of the most vital and most overlooked resources on Earth. It takes centuries to form, supports all terrestrial food systems, regulates water cycles, stores carbon, and sustains biodiversity — yet across the Mediterranean region, it is disappearing faster than it can regenerate. Land degradation, unsustainable agricultural practices, climate change, and decades of inadequate monitoring have pushed Mediterranean soils to a critical threshold.
SOILS4MED — Soil Health Monitoring and Information Systems for Sustainable Soil Management in the Mediterranean Region — was created to respond to this challenge with scientific rigor, regional sensitivity, and a long-term vision.
Funded under the PRIMA Programme (Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area), within the Horizon Europe framework, SOILS4MED is a 42-month project running from May 2023 to October 2026, with a total budget of €4,100,000. It is coordinated by Prof. Claudio Zucca at the University of Sassari (UNISS), Italy, and brings together a consortium of 16 research units across 10 countries representing the full geographic and ecological diversity of the Mediterranean basin — from Spain, France, Italy, and Greece in the north, to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey in the south and east.
The problem SOILS4MED addresses is both scientific and structural. The health level of soil and land resources in the Mediterranean Region is already low and increasingly inadequate to support economic development and food security, particularly in Near East and North Africa (NENA) countries. But the barrier to action is not only the degradation itself — it is the profound lack of reliable, comparable, and accessible soil data and information (SDI). Without harmonized data, it is impossible to design effective policies, monitor progress toward sustainability targets, or give land managers the tools they need to act. This data gap is what SOILS4MED is built to close.
The project’s approach is both ambitious and pragmatic. Rather than working in isolation, SOILS4MED engages a broad platform of scientists, stakeholders, policymakers, and final users in the co-design of monitoring systems — ensuring that the solutions produced are scientifically sound, locally relevant, and politically actionable. This co-design process is structured around the Living Lab model: collaborative, multi-actor initiatives that bring together researchers, farmers, advisors, government representatives, civil society organizations, and international bodies to experiment, test, and validate solutions in real conditions.
At the technical core of the project is the development of a Mediterranean-adapted Soil Ecosystem Health (SEH) monitoring protocol — a comprehensive, regionally calibrated framework inspired by the European LUCAS soil survey methodology. This protocol defines an integrated set of indicators and standardized field procedures designed to work across the highly diverse soils, climates, and land use systems of the Mediterranean. It has been validated in study areas representing the major agroecological regions and soil types of the region, generating what will be the first-ever large, harmonized, open-access soil health dataset for the entire Mediterranean — a landmark scientific contribution with direct applications for policy and practice.
Beyond data collection, SOILS4MED demonstrates how this newly produced soil data — integrated with existing legacy datasets — can feed state-of-the-art Decision Support Systems (DSS) for sustainable soil and water management, land degradation neutrality monitoring, precision farming, and regional carbon stock mapping. The goal is to show concretely, and with evidence, that investing in soil data and information produces measurable societal and economic returns.
A further and equally critical pillar of the project is the design and deployment of standardized, country-owned Soil Information Systems (SIS): digital infrastructures that allow partner countries to manage, update, visualize, and share their soil data in a structured and interoperable way. These systems are designed for long-term sustainability — they are not project outputs that end when funding ends, but national capacities that countries can own, maintain, and expand independently.
SOILS4MED is embedded in a wider European and global policy landscape. It is directly aligned with the EU Mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’ — the flagship European initiative aiming to have 75% of soils in healthy condition by 2030 — and contributes to multiple EU Green Deal strategies including Farm to Fork, the EU Biodiversity Strategy, and the Climate Adaptation Strategy. It works in active synergy with FAO’s Global Soil Partnership, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, and ISRIC – World Soil Information, and will contribute scientific outputs to the forthcoming Soil Atlas of the Mediterranean Region.
In this sense, SOILS4MED is more than a research project. It is an investment in the shared infrastructure — scientific, digital, and institutional — that the Mediterranean needs to govern its soils wisely, equitably, and sustainably for generations to come.