NORDROCS 2014 conference EU Legislation applying to Contaminated sites management and future needs D. Darmendrail Common Forum on contaminated land in Europe, c/o BRGM Tour Mirabeau, 39 – 43 Quai André Citroën, 75739 Paris cedex 15, France d.darmendrail@brgm.fr Introduction Contaminated land policies started to be developed when several incidents attracted major media attention (Love Canal, USA or Lekkekerk, the Netherlands). Three types of national policies were successively generated:  a systematic approach (inventories, protocols) with a drastic control of soil contamination, in the early 80s,  around 1990, a contaminated land and risk assessment approach, with a real focus on land use as the main criteria for assessing and decision-making,  Since 2000, a risk based land management (RBLM) and solution design, which integrates spatial planning, soil & water management, socio-economy issues. Some European Member States have already decided to implement the RBLM concept in their national legal framework (e.g. the Netherlands, France, Austria) while other are just changing from the source control approach to risk assessment. More recently, the regulatory environment at the European level is evolving rapidly and different European legal documents aim to take soil issues into consideration. Some evolution is already foreseen for being able to tackle the upcoming societal challenges (e.g. increasing demand on natural resources / energy / food, urbanisation and related infrastructures, climate change mitigation). The EU legislation and regulations impacting contaminated sites management Currently more than 15 EU texts have soil provisions impacting therefore the contaminated sites management (cf. figure 1). This dispersion of EU soil provisions causes difficulties in transposition and implementation in the Member States. In 2007 a Soil Protection Strategy has been published with four pillars: (1) Framework legislation with protection and sustainable use of soil as its principal aim; – A draft Framework directive on soil protection was proposed in 2007 and it’s still under discussion: Some experienced Member States have main concerns on the recent developments of EU legislation related to soil issues. (2) Integration of soil protection into other policies – Revision of the Sewage Sludge Directive, the Industrial Emission Directive, the Waste Framework Directive, the Environment Liability Directive – Integration of Soil Provisions in new EU legislation such the Renewable Energies Directive, or new strategies (Biodiversity, Climate Change, Rural development Plans), – Development of the Environmental reporting under the INSPIRE Directive, – Development of the Resource Efficiency Roadmap, (3) Closing the recognized knowledge gap by Community and national research programmes;