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The European Union with its 2.9% of world land contributes to 1.3% of the total global annual soil erosion estimate of 75 Mt (Pimentel et al. 1995). A Pan-European assessment such as the current study allows to guide investments for soil protection against erosion and prioritise actions for effective remediation. The spatial analysis of the EU soil erosion map per land cover/use, country, climatic zone and soil erosion class allows to identify hot spots where efforts to prevent further soil degradation should be focused. In a cost-benefit analysis, Kuhlman (2010) demonstrated the economic benefit (onsite and offsite) of 1.35 Billion Euros after of taking anti-erosion measures (terracing – stone walls, grass margins, contour farming, reduced tillage cover crop and plant residues) in severe erosive agricultural areas (> 10 t/ha annually).

The distribution of erosion rates is positively skewed with a median value of 1.27 t ha^-1 yr^-1. More than ¾ of the total European land has erosion rates lower than 2 t ha^-1 yr^-1 which are considered sustainable according to the general accepted soil formation rates (Verheijen et al., 2009). The rest 24%

of the study area with erosion rates higher than 2 t ha^-1 yr^-1 contributes to the almost 87% of the total soil loss (Table 3). Soil protection measures should definitely be taken in the 5.2% of the European land suffering of severe erosion (> 10 t ha^-1 yr^-1) and contributing to the 52% of the total soil loss. An example of such measurement is the afforestation or re-vegetation of sparse vegetation areas which have extreme erosion rates.

Focusing on arable lands, the 12.7% of the croplands in the European Union (eq. 14 * 10⁶ ha) have erosion rates higher than 5 t ha^-1 yr^-1 (Table 3).

A layer of at least 0.4 mm is eroded annually (Montgomery, 2007) at those croplands, where emerging management practices should be applied in order to ensure agricultural sustainability in EU.

Table 3: Analysis of erosion rates per classes (in whole study area and focus on croplands)

196 Erosion Class

t ha^-1 yr^-1

% of total area

Mean Erosion rate in the class (t ha^-1 yr^-1)

% contribution in total soil loss

% of cropland

0 - 1 63.5% 0.24 6.1% 44.4%

1 - 2 12.3% 1.43 7.2% 23.0%

2 - 5 12.8% 3.18 16.8% 19.9%

5 - 10 6.2% 7.00 17.8% 7.6%

10 - 20 3.2% 13.79 18.2% 3.6%

20 - 50 1.6% 29.51 19.0% 1.4%

> 50 0.4% 88.67 14.9% 0.1%

Total 100.0% 2.46 100.0% 100.0%

Soil erosion is among the agro-environmental indicators developed in the European Commission services for monitoring the agricultural and environmental policies. The EU soil erosion map (Fig. 2) supports the statistical service DG-EUROSTAT with aggregated data at various geographic levels (national, regional, provincial). The Directorate General responsible for the implementation of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in EU (DG AGRI) focuses on soil erosion in agricultural lands and requests indicators of soil erosion in agricultural lands. An example of such indicators is the annual soil erosion rates in arable lands at NUTS3 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics level 3) level (Fig. 4). The percentage of agricultural land affected by erosion is among the Green growth indicators of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

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Fig. 4: Mean soil erosion rates at Province level (NUTS3) for arable lands in EU

The RUSLE2015 model structure has the option to host land management and land use change plus climate change scenarios. As such, the model becomes a useful tool for policy makers to make both past assessments and estimate erosion changes based on future scenarios.

In terms of land management, we gave special focus on agricultural lands as C-factor can be changed by farmers’ intervention. In the European Union and specifically in the context of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), farmers are receiving direct payments that requiring them to follow particular management practices beneficial to the environment. Agro-environmental

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standards are set in the Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition (GAEC) introduced by the CAP reform in 2003 and implemented by the Member States after 2005 (Angileri et al., 2009). The GAEC includes as mandatory the measures for soil protection by erosion and proposes the limitation of bare soils, the promotion of reduced tillage and the minimum soil cover, the contour farming in sloppy areas, the maintenance of terraces and stone walls and the increase of grass margins (Matthews, 2013).

The implementation of GAEC in agricultural lands of Member states has a positive impact in reducing soil erosion rates. Since there are no statistical data about reduced tillage, soil cover, contour farming, terracing and grass margins before the GAEC implementation in 2003, we make the hypothesis that those management practices were not applied before or they were very limited. Their impact during the last decade (2003-2010) was to reduce soil erosion in agricultural lands from 3.35 t ha^-1 yr^-1 to 2.67 t ha^-1 (-20.2%). Under the condition that no GAEC have been applied in EU, the mean soil erosion rate in the study area (agricultural lands, forests and semi-natural areas) would have been 2.65 t ha^-1 yr^-1. Compared to the current estimated mean annual rate of 2.46 t ha^-1 yr^-1, this implies that overall soil erosion in EU was reduced by 7% during the last decade due to policy measurements (GAEC).

The highest effect of GAEC has been noticed in Cyprus, Bulgaria, Germany, United Kingdom and France with a reduction of more than 30% in mean erosion rates in agricultural lands. The less impact has been noticed mainly in Eastern European countries (new Member states after the 2004 enlargement) with a decrease of mean erosion rates in agricultural lands of less than 13.5%.

As was shown in chapter 6, the management practice with the greater impact was the reduced and no tillage which is currently applied in more than 25% of the agricultural lands of the European Union (Panagos et al., 2015b). Plant residues and cover crops are the other two management practices incorporated in the RUSLE2015 C-factor which had very limited contribution to soil erosion rate decrease (c.a 1% each), mainly due to their limited extent in agricultural lands of EU. Among the support practices (P-factor) applied in agricultural lands of EU during the last decade (chapter 7),

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the grass margins had the major effect (>1%) in reducing soil erosion rates while the contour farming impact was insignificant (0.15%) due to very limited application in Europe (Panagos et al, 2015c).

A sensitivity analysis of in the cover-management factor (C-factor) allows to perform future scenarios of land use based on crop rotation changes that may be imposed by EU policies. An evident example is the European Union Biofuels Directive (BFD) which will put a pressure in transforming cereal croplands (C-factor: 0.20) to energy croplands such as sugar beets, sunflowers and maize (C-factor: 0.38) and in addition will result in sreducing crop residues. Taking into account the BFD requests and applying a scenario of 10% crop change from cereals to energy crops (Frondel and Peters, 2007) will result in a C-factor increase by 3.8% in arable lands and as a consequence 2.2% growth of mean soil erosion rates.

In the context of climate change, we selected one of the most applied future scenarios of the Fifth Assessment Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2013) report named HadGEM2 (Martin et al., 2011) and we considered a relatively conservative increase of greenhouse gas concentration and a global temperature increase by 1 degree till 2050 (Representative Concentration Pathways - RCP 2.6). Based on this scenario, the future predictions of precipitation in Europe from the Worldclim (Hijmans et al., 2005) are used in combination with the rainfall erosivity (Panagos et al., 2015a) to develop a future rainfall erosivity prediction. The erosivity density is the ratio of mean annual R-factor to the mean annual precipitation (Kinnel, 2010) and is considered as constant in the future climate change scenario.

This conservative scenario allows to estimate a decrease of rainfall erosivity in the EU by 8.2% by 2050 (similar to the precipitation decrease) and as a result a similar decrease in soil erosion rates. The most important outcome of this future scenario is that the Mediterranean climatic zone will have the highest decrease of the R-factor by 10.4% and the boreal will experience the lowest decrease (4.6%) while the rest of the climatic zones will notice decrease of rainfall erosivity around 7%. However, this scenario should be improved by

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taking into account the possible increase of erosivity density in the next 40 years.

Similar to climate change, we selected the projections of land use change for year 2050 based on pan-European Land Use Modelling Platform (LUMP) (Lavalle et al., 2013). LUMP translates policy scenarios into land-use changes such as afforestation and deforestation, pressure on natural areas, abandonment of productive agricultural areas and urbanization.

According to LUMP, all agricultural land uses will be reduced (croplands will decrease by 1.2%, permanent crops by 0.2% and pastures by 0.6%) plus semi-natural areas will also decrease by 1%. The urban areas will increase by 0.7% and the forests by 2.2%. Forestlands are the less erosive with mean annual soil loss of 0.065 t/ha and will replace erosive land uses (permanent crops, arable, pastures and semi-natural). In total soil loss terms, the projected land use changes according to LUMP will result in soil erosion reduction by 5.8%. However, LUMP should take into consideration the imminent threat of peak phosphorous with the only noteworthy P resources left in the Western Sarah and Marocco after 2013 (Elser and Bennett, 2013). Under this threat, the European states will most likely start to increase their area of arable land considerably in the near future.