Project

Iedere Dag Bodemzorg (soil care every day)

Soil management is more topical than ever. Not only pollution, but also surface hardening and compaction, among other things, affect the soil’s ability to cope with more extreme weather conditions, produce food or store carbon. For several years there has been talk of a shift from cure – simply removing contamination – to care, hence the term 'soil care'. Broadening our perspective is one thing, adapting our actions accordingly is quite another. The 'Ieder Dag Bodemzorg' project (soil care every day) explores how OVAM's project collaborators and policy officers can implement soil care in practice on a daily basis.  

As the Agency competent for, among other things, managing, preventing and remediating soil pollution with a view to sustainable soil management, OVAM is one of the crucial partners in implementing soil care. To this end, it appointed us, along with Ossiado and Tweeperenboom for three years, as a consortium to explore opportunities related to soil care internally in OVAM's ongoing projects. We proposed a process of several types of sessions. The first step in the process involved a self-test and harvest session, which provided an idea of the way in which soil care is (or is not) applied by OVAM employees during an average working day. We explicitly focused on daily implementation, relating the thematic of soil care to the ongoing files and daily challenges. The session focused on the challenges that OVAM employees face on a daily basis, such as dealing with diffuse pollution in residential areas, new emerging substances, the increasing complexity of projects, and so on. These insights were bundled in a first reporting journal called Daily Bodemzorg (Daily Soil Care). 

On-site connection session

Working with familiar types of sites, such as a landfill site, a residential zone or an industrial site allowed us to identify the challenges and opportunities involved in soil care. At each of these types of sites, OVAM acts in a different capacity, various instruments may or may not be available and OVAM can seek cooperation with a wide range of actors. One typical site where many questions remain unanswered is that of diffuse pollution in residential areas. We examined a specific case in depth to acquire a better understanding of these questions. An on-site connection session brought together the various stakeholders, consisting of residents, soil remediation experts, file owners, municipal officials and more. Together they reflected on the past and constructed a timeline of crucial events, cooperation agreements and results, going back as far as 20 years. We were able to use the lessons learned and missed opportunities from the exercise to work with the diverse range of participants and design an ideal process approach that could potentially tackle diffuse pollution in residential areas in the future.  

Ten breakthrough points

This process approach consists of ten breakthrough points, or ten seeds that have been sown to achieve possible 'breakthroughs' in similar situations concerning diffuse pollution. They contain recommendations for cooperation, data collection, role distribution, communication, knowledge development and sharing, etc. These ten points were jointly evaluated with several OVAM employees during a strategic breakthrough session and the potential for their further elaboration and approach within OVAM was identified. 

Daily Bodemzorg

At the end of the project, we looked back with a wide group of OVAM employees on the lessons learned, both in terms of content and process. For this purpose, a second edition of the Daily Bodemzorg (Daily Soil Care) was put together, a journal distributed to all employees, summarising the insights, lessons and next steps involved in the process. In this sense, the end point also allows us to look ahead to the new opportunities and seeds that soil care can provide in the future, not only in relation to diffuse pollution in residential areas, but also for other types of sites.  

PERIOD: 2022-2024  

INITIATOR: OVAM 

PARTNERS: Ossiado & Tweeperenboom 

Related Projects
2018: Grond+Zaken
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2019: Soil Caretakers in the Spotlight
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Soil+Land Stewardship
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