The ECMWF land surface model has evolved as a modelling system (ECland) that would facilitate such modular extensions for the benefit of efficient developments and external collaborations. Figure 1 illustrates the main ECLand system components and its prospective evolution elements that would facilitate its interaction with external projects and modular added services and being part of the full Integrated forecasting system. The ECLand system attempts to resolve several processes linked to the water, energy and carbon cycles under an earth system modeling concept. Examples of theses processes are depicted in the different boxes of Figure 1 and detailed in the following sections. Important criteria for incorporating land-surface developments into ECLand are: _Observability_, for example, EO-data driven Calibration/Validation and Initialization, and added complexity if there is a route to successfully initialise and verify; _Relevance_ for NWP and Copernicus applications, for example, leading to a substantial product enhancement; _Impact_ on coupled Earth System forecast performance and key products, for example, improving NWP, extended range or seasonal atmospheric forecast skill, or providing skill products for Copernicus services. There is a long track record of participation in model intercomparison projects facilitated by WMO (e.g., GEWEX, WGNE), which above all verifies and validates different approaches, and sets standards for model development while identifying and publicising systematic model errors, model uncertainty and shortcomings. It also illustrates needs for added complexity and thus makes the case for any of the above criteria, namely observability, relevance, or impact. Meaningful examples are PLUMBER [21, 22] dedicated to benchmarking, or the EarthH2 Observe FP7 project [23] where ECMWF provided high quality standardly formatted global meteorological forcing and coordinated a first multi-model Water Resources Reanalysis based on ERA-Interim/Land experience [24]. For hydrology, C3S assets such as ERA5L [14] motivated the ULYSSES project within the C3S sectoral hydrological applications with an offline multi-model stream. For Carbon, the CHE Horizon 2020 project [25] within the ECMWF CO\({}_{2}\) activities, have established ECMWF as a European CO\({}_{2}\) monitoring integrator and will within COCO\({}_{2}\) project coordinate a land multi-model benchmarking activity. This will be supported by experience gained within the Numerical Weather Prediction, for which a set of land-atmosphere coupling development priorities have been defined [26]. This paper describes the ECMWF land surface modelling system ECLand and a snapshot of its new developments. ECLand is based on the previous CHTESSEL parametrization with recent new developments focusing on the improvement of NWP within an earth system modeling concept. The recent developments aim at supporting new research questions in weather, hydrology, climate and environmental applications, ultimately at global kilometric-scale spatial resolution. The configuration used in ECMWF's operational NWP is described in the next section (Section 2: model description), followed by ongoing developments aimed at improving the model and its application under the model developments Section 3. An evaluation of the different new components is then performed, depending on the nature of the change with offline and/or coupled simulations, in Section 4 (evaluation of model developments) and a final Section 5 presents a summary and future perspectives.