Being serious about no net land take: Land take mitigation – challenges and solutions

This webinar is the first out of two in 2025 discussing land take and soil sealing with a diverse group of stakeholders. This first webinar will look at the challenges, conditions and solutions to mitigate land take, whereas a second webinar later in 2025 will focus on land take and soil sealing data sets for monitoring.

While there is still a debate about an official and legally binding definition of land take, it is currently widely understood as the conversion of natural and semi-natural land into built-up or otherwise artificialized surfaces. Land take is primarily driven by urbanisation and infrastructure expansion at the cost of fertile soils. Achieving No Net Land Take (NNLT) by 2050 is a policy target of the European Commission since 2011 (EU Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe) and has recently been acknowledged in the EU European Soil Strategy 2030. However, land take including soil sealing rates have remained high predominantly at the expense of agricultural land. According to the EEA’s State of European Environment Report (SOER) 2020 the EU 2050 target of no net land take is unlikely to be met unless annual rates of land take are further reduced and/or land recycling is increased. Soil sealing consumes predominantly fertile soils (EEA 2023): considering that 60-70 % of European soils are estimated to be in poor health, and considering continued urban sprawl as a significant pressure towards soils, the EU and its Member States urgently need to step up their efforts to combat land take. One possible approach could be the national implementation of “land take hierarchy” principles as anchored in the EU Soil Strategy 2030.

A preliminary reality check of the land take hierarchy (EU Soil Strategy 2030) concluded that:

• efforts to avoid land take require spatial planning strategies at national/regional/localscales,
• land monitoring data show that the re-use of land (land recycling) is still limited and muchbelow potentials,
• considering that mostly agricultural land is lost due to land take, efforts to concentrate landtake on less productive or already degraded soils seem to be failing,
• the scope of compensation measures need clarification to contribute substantially to areduction of net land take rates.

This webinar will set in motion a process of knowledge exchange and good practice, building on experiences of how to avoid land take. The EIONET Group on Land Systems and other networks, organisations and projects will be invited to further explore the challenge of land take. Despite well- established and often participatory spatial planning processes, there still seem to be many knowledge
gaps about how to conceptualise soil-sensitive planning and how barriers for implementation can be
overcome.

Find the detailed agenda here.