The European Joint Programme “EJP SOIL - Towards climate-smart sustainable management of agricultural soils” comprise 24 countries committed to the overall goal of providing sustainable agricultural soil management solutions that contribute to key societal challenges including climate change and future food supply.
The objective of this call is to foster holistic agricultural soil management practices which will assist making a shift to diversify farming to include a variety of sustainable and environmental practices.
Knowledge gaps in the area of SOC sequestration need to be closed, e.g. by developing soil management options which help to protect existing stocks of soil carbon and store additional C through sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. Effective CO2 sequestration can help reduce GHG emissions thereby helping to fulfil the objectives of the European Green Deal.
Another objective is to make shift from those agricultural practices that contributes to soil degradation, towards, more sustainable practices and methods. This not only addresses sustainable production but also healthy environment, which can be achieved by, enhancing knowledge about biodiversity, and understanding functionalities and interactions in soils. Strong population growth combined with climate change challenges have placed food security high on the global agenda and therefore it is one of the key elements of the EU’s farm to fork strategy.
Read more detailed information in the document 'Pre-Announcement 1st external call'.
More than 16 funding organisations from 14 countries will contribute to the 1st external call.
Researchers from participating countries can apply on the research topic outline above.
Research partners from not participating countries can be part of research consortia if they bring in their own funding.
All proposals must fulfil the general as wells as the applicable national eligibility criteria. General eligibility criteria are:
A webinar will be organised in May for all interested applicants.
Content of the webinar will be an overview about all relevant aspects for the Call and will give a short introduction for the submission tool. More detailed information will be released directly on the submission tool website and here in due time.
Preliminary list of participating countries
Country | Organisation |
BE | Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek – Vlaanderen |
BE | Centre wallon de recherches agronomiques* |
DE | Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung |
FI | Maa- ja metsätalousministeriö |
FR | Agence nationale de la recherche |
HU | National Research, Development and Innovation Office |
IE | Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine |
IT | Ministero delle politiche agricole alimentari e forestali |
LT | The ministry of Agriculture of the Republic of Lithuania* |
NO | Norwegian Research Council |
/ | Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases |
NZ | Ministry for Primary Industries |
PL | The National Centre for Research and Development |
PT | Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia* |
RU | Department of State scientific and technological policy in the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation |
UK | Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council |
The call will be conducted as one-step-procedures but proposals are only eligible if a project summary is submitted and coordinator and corresponding partners of the projects are registered in provided submission tool:
Task | Schedule |
Pre-announcement | April 06th 2021 |
Launch of the Call | April 2021 |
Webinar for interested applicants | May 2021 |
Deadline Registration of project | June 25th 2021 |
Deadline Proposal submission | Sept 07th 2021 |
Proposal evaluation and selection | Sept-Nov 2021 |
Aimed start of research projects | Dec 2021-Jan 2022 |
NAME: Ulrike Ziegler Christian Breuer
Organisation: Jülich Jülich
Phone: +49 2429 90 88 055 +49 2465 30 58 847
E-mail: u.ziegler@fz-juelich.de c.breuer@fz-juelich.de
The EJP SOIL programme has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 862695