Nature based solutions (NbS) and soil engineering strategies offer multifunctional opportunities to strengthen climate resilience in both urban and rural environments. Healthy soils and well designed green infrastructures can help mitigate extreme heat, flooding, and drought, while improving water retention, reducing pollution, and supporting biodiversity and ecosystem restoration. Yet their implementation is often hindered by limited awareness of soil functions, competing land use pressures, and difficulties integrating subsurface knowledge into planning and design processes.
Across Europe, soil health is under growing pressure from land take, erosion, pollution, and climate change. These pressures undermine soils’ ability to provide many NbS to overcome problems and essential ecosystem services such as food production, carbon storage, and clean water. Mission Soil(EC, 2021) identifies spatial planning as a key instrument for achieving land degradation neutrality. However, soils and subsoils remain largely invisible in current planning and education, with many policymakers, landowners, and planners unaware of the opportunities and constraints that soil systems present.
This special session invites interdisciplinary contributions that explore how soil structure, function, and engineered soil systems can be integrated into spatial planning, urban design, and landscape engineering to create climate adaptive and ecologically robust environments. We welcome case studies, modelling approaches, and planning frameworks that assess potentials, limitations, co benefits, and trade offs across climate, ecological, and urban systems.
By embedding soil knowledge and soil care into planning and design, we can support healthier soils, enhance climate resilience, and avoid unintended trade offs across functions, generations, and landscapes.
Patrice Prunier, Junga Lee, Yakov Kuzyakov