Four years after the now infamous ruling of the Council of State, the government’s new nitrogen approach is finally taking shape.
For years, far more nitrogen has been emitted in the Netherlands than nature can tolerate. With all the consequences that entails: vulnerable nature is being overgrown. What now? The Netherlands is small and crowded: new activity – a livestock farmer who wants to expand a barn, a province who wants to widen a highway, the government who wants to build new residential areas – quickly leads to extra nitrogen pressure on vulnerable nature reserves. That is not allowed, the Council of State ruled in 2019.
Nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal (VVD) has the task of significantly reducing emissions, so that nature can recover and it is easier to build. The first step: tempting three thousand so-called peak loaders, who have the greatest impact on vulnerable nature, to reduce their nitrogen emissions. But how does Van der Wal know who the peak loaders are?
Hexagons
The role of agriculture
Every sector must emit less nitrogen in the coming years, but a great deal of administrative and social attention is being paid to the agricultural sector.
The focus on the agricultural sector is not without reason. According to calculations by RIVM, agriculture is the largest source of nitrogen that burdens vulnerable natural areas. Livestock farmers play the largest role in this.
This is because livestock farmers are often relatively close to nature reserves. The manure and urine produced by their livestock cause emissions of the nitrogen compound ammonia. That nitrogen evaporates throughout the country, but the largest quantities land close to the stables. In addition, agriculture emits a lot of nitrogen: the list With the hundred largest nitrogen emitters, RIVM has ninety livestock farms.
With a special ‘peak loader approach’, nitrogen minister Van der Wal wants to tackle the three thousand largest loaders this year. The hope is that they will voluntarily participate in ‘wildly attractive’ buy-out schemes, but coercion – ‘obligatory instruments’ as they call it in covert terms – is not ruled out in order to achieve the targets. Rather not, Van der Wal often says, but the Netherlands must now really work on nitrogen reduction.
Aerius
How does Minister Van der Wal determine which companies put the most burden on vulnerable nature reserves, and which should therefore be tempted to buy out?
This is where the complicated calculation model of the RIVM comes into play. That model, Aerius, can calculate on the basis of the emission (emission) in which hexagons how many of these nitrogen particles end up (deposition). They are complex calculations that require many factors to be taken into account. It works roughly like this.
It’s all about precipitation
Aerius is public: everyone can do their own calculations with it. NRC also calculated with the model and entered the data from the example of the cow farmer.
What does the buyout yield?
By calculating the emissions of many companies, Van der Wal can therefore draw up a list of peak loads: the companies that contribute most to the nitrogen load of vulnerable nature areas.
NRC cannot do those calculations exactly. RIVM uses data from the annual agricultural census. Every year, farmers have to fill in how many animals they have, what kind of barn they are in and where those barns are located. That data is not public.
The provinces of Gelderland, North Brabant and Limburg did, however, publish the permits of livestock farms. On the basis of this data, NRC calculated, for example, the nitrogen precipitation of the companies within a kilometer of the Veluwe.
Many peak loaders in livestock farming will be located in these provinces. They are important agricultural provinces: more than half of the nitrogen emissions from agriculture come from there. Almost half of the protected nature areas, the so-called Natura 2000 areas, are also located in these provinces. Many intensive livestock farmers are also located here: of the ninety largest nitrogen-emitting livestock farms, almost seventy are located in Limburg, North Brabant or Gelderland.
It is not known how many companies Van der Wal wants to buy out. She hopes that her combined approach – for example, farmers are also allowed to reduce their emissions by innovating their stables – will yield approximately the same results as the proposal of cabinet adviser Johan Remkes. Last autumn, he proposed to make quick work of buying out the six hundred largest peak loaders.
By buying out the six hundred largest taxers in livestock farming, the number of hectares that are overloaded by nitrogen precipitation will decrease. According to NRC calculations, the proportion of hexagons below the critical deposition value rises from 33 percent to approximately 36 percent.
Made a start
According to professors Jan Willem Erisman (Leiden University) and Wim de Vries (Wageningen University & Research), if the peak loader approach works according to Van der Wal’s expectations, it will reduce nitrogen precipitation sufficiently to unlock the Netherlands. But, they emphasize, the restoration of nature has only just begun. For example, buying out the top 600 makes an important but small difference. So small that it is barely visible on the map.
The final target in the Nitrogen Act – 74 percent of the nature area below the critical deposition value in 2035 – is therefore still a long way off. According to experts, to get close to this target, a reduction of the livestock population by about 30 to 35 percent is required. A major operation, for which even less time is available, because the current coalition wants to achieve that goal by 2030.
This ambition is by no means politically undisputed. The big winner of the past Provincial Council elections, the BoerBurgerBeweging, wants the advance off the table. Compulsory instruments are not negotiable at all, said party leader Caroline van der Plas.
- Text and research
- Rick Wassen and Walter van Loon
- Visualizations
- Pippin Bernard, Rose Love and Tim Tensen
- Digital design
- Koen Smeets
- Final editing
- Renee Peereboom
- coordination
- Midas of Son and Winnie de Jong