Can you make gold by calling a gold-iron alloy gold? Can you protect nature by lowering the standard for quality and protection? If so, we have added a national park since April: Hollandse Duinen National Park (NPHD), with 18,000 hectares of beach including dozens of beach bars, bulb fields, amusement parks, residential areas, water extraction areas, meadows where manure is spread annually with ditches around them where no life is visible, the Haagse Bos with the Malieveld and areas of beautiful nature. On the website of the central government: “Essen’s Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature has officially granted the Hollandse Duinen National Park the status of a national park.”
Hurrah? No. Not the government but the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) determines whether an area is a national park, see the site co-run by them protectedplanet.net. The government calls Hollandse Duinen a national park, but that means nothing, the term is unprotected. You can call your own backyard a national park with impunity, or a planter on your balcony, or the habitat of your intestinal flora. Or, and that is what this is about, the coastal strip between Hoek van Holland and Hillegon and the inland peat areas and beach walls.
National parks date back to the time when national governments proclaimed them, such as the Veluwezoom National Park in 1930, the Dutch first. The American Yellowstone was the first national park in the world in 1872. Over time, the question increasingly arose as to what requirements a national park had to meet. Wouldn’t it be better to leave the drawing up of the quality requirements to a disinterested international organization, which also checked whether the designated national parks met those requirements? An additional reason for such an approach was that the term ‘national park’, thanks to Serengeti, Yosemite, Sarek and the Swiss National Park, among others, had great tourist potential. An area called that must be beautiful, many travelers and governments reasoned. Attract more tourists? Declare a national park!
Founded in 1948, with headquarters near Geneva, the IUCN embarked on a global protected area agenda, resulting in a system of six types in 1994. The best known of these is category 2, a national park. Category 5, national landscape, also gained fame. A national park is succinctly referred to by the IUCN as “a large natural or nature-like area that protects large-scale ecological processes and species while providing opportunities for education and recreation.”
Vaguely formulated requirements
In the late 1990s, the Dutch government decided to establish a series of new national parks and, in consultation with the IUCN, the “large” requirement was lowered to at least 1,000 hectares. It was more difficult with other requirements such as large-scale ecological processes, which in the Netherlands are at most in the Wadden Sea or the Veluwe. A category 2 area must also be surrounded by a protected buffer zone in which nothing happens that could harm nature.
In short, the Netherlands got stuck with the IUCN system and decided, brilliantly, to throw it overboard. A few other countries partly served as an example, such as the United Kingdom, where the label has been in place for years national park is in areas that are not, according to the IUCN, such as Brecon Beacons and Dartmoor. The Netherlands chose the term in 2017 national park new styledescribed in Article 8.3 of the Nature Conservation Act of that year, with a few vaguely formulated requirements. It should be noted that the IUCN advocates that every country incorporate the IUCN requirements directly into its legislation, which many countries have already done.
During the deliberations about the content of new style the representatives of Natuurmonumenten, Staatsbosbeheer and IUCN Netherlands had little input. As one of them later said: “The main purpose of national parks, protecting nature and biodiversity, was not sufficiently stated […]. Sometimes a lot of people from the tourism and recreation sector participated in these meetings. Marketing types all. Their representation there alone caused us concern.”
The requirements for our new-style national parks have once again proven to be too high
We are ten years later. The Nature Conservation Act was merged into the Nature Conservation Act in 2024 Environmental law. It defines a national park as ‘an area with important natural scientific or landscape qualities’, without a word about protection and management. The requirements for our new-style national parks, further defined by the National Parks Bureau that was established in 2018, have again proven to be too high. Now it is happening national park 3.0of which NPHD is an example. Director Eveline Butler said on April 28 in the NOS Journal about the one million people in and close to the park: “Man is also nature.”
The Netherlands is always keen to operate in and connect with international connections and agreements. But when it comes to frameworks for nature protection, we are isolationist. Returning to the IUCN standard is the solution, but now seems unthinkable. We are waiting for the status of national park 4.0maybe it will be 5.0whereby the entire country could be declared a national park.
