Our soils are extremely valuable, but often not enough taken care of. Especially in cities it is very common to seal the ground with impervious materials for housing, streets, and car parks. Soil sealing contributes to global warming, promotes water scarcity and flooding at the same time, and puts biodiversity at risk.
European cities show a varying degree of soil sealing.
Here you can explore the degrees of soil sealing in Europe's cities, grouped per country.
Scroll over a country to see how many cities have at least half of their soil sealed.
Click on a country to see the average amount of soil sealing across its cities.
SOIL SEALING is the loss of soil resources
due to the covering of land for housing, roads or other construction work.