The Institute for Good Governance and Policies in the Environment and Climate Change – Skopje (IPECC) through a contract with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), is supporting the Ministry of environment and physical Planning (MoEPP) in the drafting and adopting the Law on Soil Protection in the Republic of North Macedonia. The purpose of the Law is to establish a legal framework for the development and strengthening of the national policy and institutional capacities for sustainable land management (SLM).
Soil is a limited, destructible, irreplaceable and non-renewable natural resource and environmental medium that is of vital importance for our country. The soil takes longer than a human lifetime to form. To ensure healthy soil now and in the future, there should be enforceable goals, specific actions for soil protection. According to estimates by the European Union, approximately 970 million tons of soil are lost annually in the member states, primarily due to erosion caused by rainfall, pollution, or soil sealing from construction activities.
Soil plays a crucial role in providing food for all living beings on planet Earth. Moreover, the safety of the food produced depends on how healthy the soil is. Therefore, it is essential to establish rules for its protection.
Healthy soil plays a key role in fighting climate change by storing large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). It serves as a second major carbon sink after the ocean, and stores more carbon than forests and even three times more than the atmosphere. Food security depends on maintaining healthy soil.
The main goal of the Law is to set a frame of rules, obligations and measures to prevent unreasonable use of the soil, to protects its qualities, to preserve its health, to preserve and protect numerous ecological functions important for the health of people, plants and animals, as well as to regulate its use in order to prevent or eliminate the harmful changes that can occur in the soil. The law defines soil protection as an activity of public interest, which all legal entities and natural persons should take care of.
