On Friday, the cabinet finally decided to focus the nitrogen approach this year on three thousand ‘peak loaders’, who must reduce their emissions by 85 percent. This mainly concerns agricultural companies and about 35 industrial companies, including waste processors, energy companies, chemical companies, food producers and paper mills. These peak loaders are given the option to make their company more sustainable, to relocate or to stop, for example by voluntarily being bought out. The arrangements for these companies must be worked out and start in April.
If peak loaders do not want to cooperate, the cabinet wants to impose mandatory measures from January 2024. How many companies will have to deal with this should become clear during an evaluation this autumn. “It is not in advance the case that all three thousand companies will be confronted with this,” Minister Christianne van der Wal (Nature and Nitrogen, VVD) wrote to the House of Representatives on Friday.
Farmer protests
The cabinet also determined on Friday how much nitrogen emissions must be reduced in traffic (25 percent) and in the industry and energy sector (38 percent), as leaked earlier this week. In June last year, the cabinet first announced the provisional nitrogen targets for the agricultural sector, which led to fierce farmers’ protests.
Read the article The nitrogen crisis explained
“It is not the case that the industry is sitting back lazily when it comes to making the Netherlands more sustainable,” said Minister Van der Wal after the cabinet meeting on Friday. “If we do not achieve those goals, then in that sense the industry is equal to the agricultural sector. Then there is also a mandatory set of instruments that cannot be ruled out with regard to tackling peak loaders.”
Nitrogen emissions must fall the most in agriculture (by 41 percent), because ammonia from manure causes the most damage to nature. Nitrogen precipitation in vulnerable natural areas (Natura 2000) in the Netherlands comes for 46 percent from agriculture, for 11 percent from traffic on land, water and in the air, and for 2 percent from the industry and energy sectors.
In agriculture, this mainly concerns the compound ammonia (nitrogen and hydrogen) from evaporated manure moisture, which precipitates in the vicinity of livestock farms. Traffic concerns nitrogen oxides (nitrogen and oxygen) that spread more widely over the country like a blanket.
New law
The government is also preparing a bill to advance the nitrogen targets from 2035 to 2030, a target that was already included in the coalition agreement. The Nitrogen Reduction and Nature Improvement Act now states that 74 percent of vulnerable nature areas must have a healthy nitrogen level by 2035; this will then be 2030.
In line with the nitrogen report by mediator Johan Remkes, the cabinet wants to measure progress in 2025 and 2028, and whether the nitrogen targets for 2030 are still achievable everywhere. Remkes himself has previously said that 2030 is “not a holy commandment” for him.
In tackling only the peak loaders, the cabinet has now imposed an “effort obligation” on itself to reduce nitrogen precipitation by 100 mol per hectare annually: this could already achieve about half of the national target for 2030, it wrote. cabinet to the House of Representatives on Friday.