Making the most of our land: meeting supply and demand of soil functions across spatial scales

The challenges of achieving both food security and sustainability have resulted in a confluence of demands on land within the European Union: we expect our land to provide food, purify water, sequester carbon, and provide a home to biodiversity and to external nutrients. All soils perform all these five functions, but some soils ‘are better at’ supplying selective functions. Functional Land Management is a framework for policy making aimed at meeting these demands by incentivising soil management and land use practices that selectively augment specific soil functions, where required. In this paper, we explore how the demands for contrasting soil functions, as framed by EU policies, may apply to very different spatial scales, from farm scale to national scale. At the same time, we show that the supply of each soil function is largely defined by local soil and land use conditions, with large variations at both local and regional level. We demonstrate that this has implications for soil management. While some soil functions must be managed at local (i.e. farm) level, others may be offset between regions with a view to solely meeting national targets. We review the policy instruments available to address the challenge of maximising the delivery of soil functions across these spatial scales, and bring these instruments together in a coherent policy framework.