'TECHNICAL COMPLEXITIES IN URBAN SOIL DIAGNOSIS'
URSOILL CITY SOIL HEALTH KNOWLEDGE FORUM 1
JOIN OUR UPCOMING WEBINAR:
TECHNICAL COMPLEXITIES IN URBAN SOIL DIAGNOSIS - URSOILL CKF N.1
28 October 2026 | 10:00 - 13:00 CET
The first URSOILL City Soil Health Knowledge Forum (CKF) will bring together perspectives from technical risk management and urban planning to explore how cities can move from discovering soil degradation and contamination towards informed action and urban soil restoration.
Download the webinar’s Concept Note.
BACKGROUND
The EU officially adopted the Soil Monitoring Law (SML) on 16 December 2025, establishing the first common legal framework for assessing and monitoring soil health across Member States. While Member States have two years to transpose the Directive into their national legal systems, the implementation process already raises important challenges for Healthy Soil Living Labs, whose mission is to test and demonstrate innovative approaches to urban soil restoration. Urban experimentation frequently requires investigating soils under uncertain conditions, potentially revealing contamination by heavy metals, PFAS, or other pollutants. Such discoveries generate immediate questions regarding liability, remediation responsibilities, costs, land-use restrictions, and public health, creating discovery complexities that may discourage experimentation and delay restoration actions. If uncertainties are not addressed, Living Labs may face increasing barriers to implementing concrete interventions, creating a tension between the ambitions of the EU Soil Mission and the emerging regulatory framework of the SML.
At the same time, the SML presents a unique opportunity to strengthen urban soil governance. By calling for the harmonisation of soil monitoring practices and requiring Member States to designate competent authorities (including, where appropriate, local and subnational authorities) to implement its provisions, the Directive creates space for cities to play a more active role in soil health management. Healthy Soil Living Labs can therefore act as pioneers in developing and testing risk-based approaches that go beyond contamination assessment by considering exposure pathways, future land uses, ecosystem functions, and social vulnerability. Such approaches can help transform soil monitoring from a compliance exercise into a proactive planning instrument that supports urban regeneration, informed decision-making, and the restoration of healthy urban soils. Consequently, the first City Soil Health Knowledge Forum (CKF) will explore how cities can navigate emerging challenges while leveraging the opportunities offered by the Soil Monitoring Law to accelerate urban soil restoration and support its future implementation.
WEBINAR'S OBJECTIVES
The webinar will specifically address the following:
- City-to-City Learning: local authorities’ previous experiences on soil quality indices, adapting soil monitoring practices to urban soils and contexts, and developing risk-based approaches.
- Alignment of Existing Tools: How can proactive municipalities align their current partnerships and policy instruments with forthcoming EU requirements?
- Risk Management: Assessing the technical, economic, and social risks of increased contamination visibility, including the polluter pays principle.
SPEAKERS
Jenny Norrman is a Swedish Professor in the Division of Geology and Geotechnics at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. She also serves as the Head of the Geology and Geotechnics Unit within the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering. Her research output spans numerous highly cited publications, including recent work developing probabilistic models to predict phytoremediation timeframes for soil contaminants at historical industrial sites in Sweden.
Lydie Sombré is a landscape architect specialising in ecosystem restoration and brownfield rehabilitation, and has been working at Brussels Environment for nearly 10 years. She was part of the Belgian Presidency’s expert team during Belgium’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, where she worked extensively on the negotiations of the Soil Monitoring Directive. She now works on its transposition into regional legislation.
Mohamed Bouamama holds a PhD in Science, specializing in Geology and Hydrogeology. Since 2007, he has been working at Brussels Environment, where he is responsible for overseeing compliance with contaminated soil management legislation. He also chairs the Emerging Contaminants Working Group within the Soil Subdivision. In this role, he coordinates scientific and regulatory monitoring activities related to emerging contaminants, particularly PFAS, and contributes to the development of management strategies and technical guidance.
Nathalie Nackaerts is a geologist at Brussels Environment, where she has been working for over 20 years. Throughout her career, she has specialized in the management of contaminated sites and soil pollution issues. In addition to her regulatory and technical responsibilities, she participates in the working group on emerging contaminants, focusing on the challenges posed by newly identified environmental pollutants and their impact on soil and groundwater quality.
URSOILL's Living Labs Leaders
Presenters for the Case Clinic section
Daniel González Clayton is an international project manager at Cluster GAIA, an association of knowledge and applied technologies industries based in Bilbao, Spain.He specializes in managing European, cross-border research and innovation initiatives. His work primarily intersects technology, regional ecosystem growth, and environmental sustainability.
Dr. Anna Speranza Espinoza Tofalos is a senior environmental scientist and researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). She works within LIST’s Environmental Sustainability Assessment and Circularity unit. Her research centers on nature-based solutions for soil decontamination, environmental biotechnology, and environmental risk assessment.
Agenda
SECTION 1: SOCIO-TECHNICAL RISKS. FROM INVISIBLE CONTAMINANTS TO ACTIONABLE URBAN SOIL INFORMATION
The first section will combine two complementary perspectives. Jenny Norrman (Chalmers University of Technology) brings expertise in contaminated soil, risk management, gentle remediation options, soil functions, ecosystem services and subsurface planning. Her work includes approaches that connect site-specific risks and soil conditions with remediation choices and sustainable land-use planning. Lydie Sombré (Brussels Environment) brings a municipal and planning perspective, including the Brussels Soil Quality Index and the use of soil-quality information and ecosystem services to inform urban development decisions. Together, the perspectives can help Living Labs consider not only how contamination is detected and assessed, but also how soil information can become usable evidence for planning, communication and restorative action.
Key Discussion Points:
- Using practical and user-friendly approaches to identify contaminant hotspots, understand uncertainty and assess risks to humans and the environment.
- Connecting soil condition, risk and remediation options with soil functions, ecosystem services and future land-use decisions.
- Understanding how soil-quality information can be translated into planning choices, including matching land uses and functions with the capacity and condition of the soil.
- How can proactive municipalities align their current partnerships and policy instruments with forthcoming EU requirements?
- Identifying technical, institutional and communication barriers that may prevent cities from acting once soil degradation or contamination is discovered.
- Exploring how better data, risk assessment, soil-quality indicators and positive communication can build confidence and unlock restorative action.
SECTION 2: “CASE CLINIC” WORKSHOP. BRINGING THE SOIL MONITORING LAW TO THE CITY LEVEL
The Case Clinic will bring the discussion from the European and national policy level to the local, practical level of cities and URSOILL Living Labs. The central question will be how the requirements and ambitions of the Soil Monitoring Law translate into concrete situations in cities, where soil needs to be investigated, risks need to be understood, soil functions and ecosystem services considered, and restoration or planning actions ultimately need to take place.
This city-level perspective is particularly relevant because cities are where the practical consequences of soil discovery materialise. Urban areas can function as important testbeds for identifying and understanding soil degradation and contamination, but also for testing and implementing remediation, restoration and planning approaches. The discovery of contamination or poor soil quality can therefore create a transition point: the city moves from knowing (or suspecting) that a soil problem exists to deciding what to do with that information in relation to land use, redevelopment, risk management and restoration.
This creates a potential tension between monitoring and action. Better data can make previously unknown soil degradation and contamination visible, but once a problem is revealed, cities may face questions about liability, responsibilities, remediation requirements, costs, land-use restrictions, public health and stakeholder reactions. At the same time, soil-quality information can support more informed planning by helping cities identify which soils should be protected, restored or prioritised for particular uses.
The Case Clinic will build on Section 1, combining the technical perspective on contamination, risk and remediation with the planning perspective on soil quality, ecosystem services and the integration of soil information into urban development. These dimensions correspond with the municipal friction points identified in the URSOILL pre-webinar survey, including legal uncertainty, data availability, capacity constraints, coordination problems, planning conflicts and stakeholder resistance.
The Clinic will therefore ask:
What happens at city level when soil monitoring or local investigation reveals a problem, and what prevents the city or Living Lab from moving from discovery and diagnosis towards restoration or informed planning action?
Activation of P2P: Participants from URSOILL Living Labs will be invited to bring a concrete case, situation or anticipated challenge from their own territory. Cases could involve, for example, uncertainty about what happens when contamination is discovered; unclear responsibilities between municipal, regional and national authorities; difficulties connecting monitoring results to spatial planning decisions; conflicts between soil restoration and development pressures; insufficient technical or financial capacity; or concerns among landowners, developers, authorities or communities about the implications of revealing soil degradation.
The cases will be used to identify the specific friction points between soil discovery, diagnosis, decision-making and action. Rather than treating the SML only as a regulatory framework, the Clinic will explore how its implementation interacts with the realities of cities as places where soil monitoring, planning, experimentation, remediation and restoration come together.
Miro Board Integration: The municipal friction map developed from the pre-webinar survey will provide a common starting point for comparing cases. Participants will be able to identify whether their challenge is primarily related to data availability, capacity, coordination, planning conflicts or stakeholder resistance, while also exploring how these dimensions interact in practice.
The purpose of the Case Clinic is therefore not to provide answers to every case. Instead, it will create a peer-learning space in which LLs can unpack their specific situations, learn from other cities and identify possible ways forward. The two expert perspectives can help distinguish between technical and risk-management issues, planning and governance issues, matters that can be addressed locally, those requiring coordination with regional or national authorities, and those that may require further policy or regulatory clarification.
Finally, the Clinic will connect the CKF directly to the upcoming URSOILL co-creation pathways. The cases discussed will be translated into practical next steps for the LLs: questions to investigate, actors to engage, data or assessments to develop, soil-quality information to integrate into planning, governance arrangements to test, or specific frictions to address through co-creation. In this way, the discovery and diagnosis phase becomes not only a potential source of risk, but also an opportunity for Living Labs to learn how to move from monitoring and diagnosis towards informed restoration and planning action.
The live event will take place via Microsoft Teams on Wednesday 28 October 2026, from 10:00 to 13:00 CET. For questions or inquiries contact info@institute-urbanex.org