Regional Webinar Series on Soil Protection as part of World Soil Day 2022

10:00-12:00 am CET

Let’s celebrate World Soil Day 2022! As soils provide most of our food and are central to our planet’s life-support system. Without healthy soils, we cannot sustain healthy lives. It is necessary to good care of soils and to be aware of the consequences of our agricultural activities, such as pesticide and Highly Hazardous Pesticides (HHPs) use, on our soil systems in order to protect our precious resource.

In order to raise awareness about these, FAO Regional Office for Europe and Central Asia hosts a Regional Webinar Series on soil protection on 5 and 6 December 2022. The first event is World Soil Day: Healthy Soils for food security in Serbia, a hybrid webinar, in which diffuse soil pollution in Serbia and the results of the FAO project “Increasing national capacities to assess the risk of diffuse agricultural soil pollution” will be discussed with the speakers and panelists. The second event, Addressing Highly Hazardous pesticides’ and promoting soil remediation, will be held under the GEF/FAO project “Lifecycle Management of Pesticides and Disposal of POPs Pesticides in Central Asian countries and Türkiye” aiming to strengthen the capacity for the sound management of pesticides; and promote alternative approaches to HHPs and decrease pesticide use. The detrimental impacts of HHPs, existing challenges and phasing-out strategies regarding HHPs will be discussed along with examples of soil remediation ranging from microbial bioremediation, Phytoremediation and Electro-kinetic Remediation as robust and concrete examples to address soil pollution in the region.