A week after the SOLO Annual Stakeholder Meeting in Kőszeg wrapped up, here are some of the highlights that are not to be missed:

Evolving Soil Weeks: The strategic shift of the 2026 Soil Week was noted, where all of the events were synchronised within the same week to maximise visibility. Moving away from general outreach, the focus this year was centered on in-depth discussions regarding overarching knowledge gaps, which successfully drew around 290 participants and identified a high number of preliminary actions worth considering. The difficulty of balancing a diverse stakeholder mix of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers was noted. The lack of technical support for farmers, fragmented or outdated soil data, the need for modernised National Soil Maps, and the urgency of educational reform to train the next generation of specialists were brought up as key issues to address.

Overarching Strategic Roadmap: A major focus was the 2025 overarching roadmap, which provides a strategy to efficiently address knowledge gaps across all Soil Mission objectives by exploiting interdisciplinary synergies and overcoming execution bottlenecks. Immediate intermediate steps were also mapped out to support the development of the roadmap's next iteration.

Driving Forces of Future Changes: The consortium reviewed conclusive results on identifying the key drivers behind future changes in European land use and soil management. These insights will directly feed into upcoming synthesis work to further refine the project's strategic direction.

Impact KPIs and Frameworks: Significant progress was shared on refining the impact KPIs selected by the Soil Mission by developing detailed measuring methodologies and a standardised reporting template, which will be tested as a pilot in selected projects and Living Labs. The preliminary results of these pilots will be presented and discussed during a workshop at the Coimbra Conference.

A big thank you to all the SOLO partners for their work and dedication during our Annual Stakeholder Meeting in Kőszeg.

Stay tuned! 👀