RESCUE

Across Europe, legacy and emerging contaminations continue to threaten soil and groundwater resources, degrading ecosystem services, reducing land value, and posing risks to human health. With nearly 2.8 million potentially contaminated sites, the scale of the challenge is striking. The recently adopted EU Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience sets the goal of achieving healthy soils across the EU by 2050. Conventional remediation practices remain challenged by the complexity and inherent uncertainty of characterising and monitoring subsurface properties and processes, and evaluating remediation performance. Europe faces a shortage of researchers and practitioners trained to apply emerging, cross-disciplinary approaches to sustainable remediation. RESCUE’s innovative doctoral training programme designed to equip doctoral candidates with the skills to integrate non-invasive geophysical methods with advanced remediation technologies responds to this need. By bridging environmental engineering with geophysics, RESCUE will strengthen Europe’s capacity to address soil and groundwater pollution challenges through more effective, efficient, and environmentally responsible solutions. Following a value-chain framework, RESCUE spans from fundamental understanding of coupled biogeochemical-geophysical processes, through high-resolution site characterisation and monitoring and optimisation of active (bio)remediation, to evaluating the socio-economic viability, sustainability and legal aspects of geophysics-informed sustainable remediation. RESCUE will drive a paradigm shift in training and practice, promoting integrated and sustainable management of soil and groundwater resources. RESCUE will train a new generation of scientists to become highly employable professionals within environmental and engineering companies, public agencies, and academic and research organizations, while establishing a sustainable training network for both academic and professional communities.