LEI has developed a method for measuring the costs and benefits of protecting soil. The method takes into account private as well as public costs and benefits, and on-site as well as off-site effects.
The soil not only yields agricultural products, but also stores carbon, buffers water, supplies raw materials such as clay and sand, and provides a living environment for many organisms as well as a foundation for buildings and infrastructure. In order to protect these functions, the European Commission has produced a Thematic Strategy on Soils, including a proposal for a Soil Frame¬work Directive, i.e. European legislation on soil management.
In selecting appropriate measures to achieve the goals of the strategy, it is important to compare the costs and benefits of each. One aspect of this is how costly it is for farmers, foresters or builders to apply a particular technique and what benefits it provides in terms of agricultural productivity, tree growth or the stability of constructions; however, one should also look at the costs and benefits from the point of view of society and of ecosystems.
In the method LEI has developed, the first step is to identify these effects, then to quantify them, and then to convert them into comparable units. Those units are specified in euros, but they express social and environmental welfare rather than money as such. Not all effects can be quantified; that is why it is important to be as complete as possible in the identification of effects, so that we know what we have measured and what we have not measured.
The method has first been applied in a general way as part of the preparation of the EU Soil Thematic Strategy and has recently been adapted for use on three specific forms of land degradation in the Netherlands: wind erosion, subsidence of peat soils and subsoil compaction.