Mark Wilmot (41)’s work on the cabinet’s nitrogen calculations has been a topic of discussion in The Hague in recent years – but his name is rarely mentioned.
Politicians often have no idea that the man who developed the calculation tool for nitrogen deposition, the so-called Aerius model, lives in Malawi, where his wife does development work. Long before corona, he was used to working remotely: when the nitrogen crisis broke out, in 2019, he was living in Myanmar.
“At the time, I had to go to The Hague a few times,” Wilmot told me in an online conversation on Thursday evening. Court hearings, crisis consultations at the ministry: the ban by the Council of State on nitrogen rules was a blow to the apparatus.
After that, a lot changed. Last Wednesday, two days before the new nitrogen plans were announced, Wilmot gave an online presentation at agricultural umbrella organization LTO Nederland about his role in this file.
His opening sheet: ‘When doubt no longer contributes to a solution.’
It illustrated where he ended up since the crisis. Until then, he worked on Aerius for ten years to the full satisfaction of politicians and civil servants. According to the database, about thirty sets of written parliamentary questions about Aerius were asked during that period. In the three years since the crisis: 124 sets.
„I have developed Aerius transparently, it is complete open source“We’ve won awards with it,” he said. “Now it is constantly a target of people who sow doubt.”
Mark Wilmot entered the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management in 2006 through an engineering firm. He had done physical geography with a minor in spatial informatics. The department did not meet European air quality standards and had no solution for a while.
Wilmot, who later switched to Wing consultancy in Wageningen, came up with a calculation model: creating space for extra economic activity by lowering particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide emissions. In 2009 it was part of the National Air Quality Cooperation Programme.
“The ministry was showing it off in The Hague,” he said.
In Agriculture they had a similar problem with too much nitrogen emissions in nature reserves, which already led to a negative judgment by the Council of State in 2008. So in 2010, Wilmot was urged to develop a calculation tool for this department as well. This became Aerius, the first version of which was ready in 2011.
It coincided with the wish of the then coalition members in the House, Ger Koopmans (CDA) and Diederik Samsom (PvdA), who reached a compromise in 2009: support for new economic activities, provided there was less nitrogen deposition in return. It also gave air to livestock farming.
Only: the legislation for this, the Nitrogen Approach Program (PAS), therefore failed in 2019 – because the promised nitrogen reduction had not been achieved.
Until then, there was hardly any criticism of Aerius. The farm successfully nominated it in 2016 for the Computable Award of the trade journal of the same name. The jury emphasized that Aerius shows how ‘ict can contribute to optimal service provision to SMEs and citizens’. In 2017, Aerius received a Certificate of Excellence from the European Commission, partly because of its open source nature.
Still, according to Wilmot, some farmers’ leaders and MPs were critical from the start. In a letter to parliament about the model in 2011, it was already stated that Aerius has an uncertainty margin of thirty to seventy percent. But parliamentary debates were not held about it at the time. For example, Eilbert Dijkgraaf, then SGP Member of Parliament, did say: “Is this reliable enough?”
According to Wilmot, the answer is still the same today: that 70 percent margin relates to the total nitrogen deposition in the country. But when granting permits for, for example, a stable extension in the Gelderse Vallei, “that uncertainty decreases substantially”.
And those uncertainties have limited significance anyway, agreed Wilmot, given “the enormous nitrogen challenge today”. And then: uncertainty is part of life. “A farmer who buys cows does not know exactly how much milk they will produce.”
Nevertheless, the facts from the letter to parliament from 2011 in the fall of 2019 were turned into a major political theme. An impasse had developed. The Ministry of Agriculture had insufficient expertise in-house. The requested advice from the Remkes Committee was praised but did not contain a solution. The coalition was divided. VVD, CDA and CU refused to go along with D66: intervention in the livestock.
So in October 2019, VVD and CDA, shortly after the first farmers’ protest, laid down in a motion that the uncertainty margins of Aerius were too large as a basis for policy. The same margins of uncertainty that were not a problem in the ten years before.
There was even a committee, led by former professor Leen Hordijk, to investigate how nitrogen deposition was calculated and measured.
In mid-2020, the committee reported that Aerius is suitable for basing policy on, but should not be used for licensing. The calculation of deposition on one hectare would lead to a scientific sham precision.
Wilmot is still astonished that he, as the creator and developer of Aerius, was not heard by Hordijk. “Incomprehensible.” Certainly also because ‘highly regarded national and international scientists’ came to the opposite conclusion in 2013, and ‘Hordijk did not come up with solutions’.
Hordijk said that he heard Wilmot’s clients belong to RIVM, the institute that took over formal responsibility for Aerius from Agriculture in 2016. The same RIVM also reports that no country in the world performs as many nitrogen measurements as the Netherlands, and that the results often support Aerius’ calculations.
The effect of Hordijk’s advice was ultimately mainly negative. To begin with, Agriculture had to recognize that there is no alternative to Aerius. Minister Christianne van der Wal (Nitrogen, VVD) agreed this week.
But after the hatch opened in 2019, agricultural activists and (their) websites – BoerenBusiness, Agraaf, Stal en Akker, etc. – produced endless reports to the effect that The Hague is distorting or withholding information about Aerius, often supplemented with suspicious political questions from Parliament. parties such as BBB or FVD.
Most of the pieces were later contradicted, in some cases it still hangs. Earlier this year, I detailed one example here, suggesting a massive scandal involving Aerius, including brooding parliamentary questions from BBB, and revealing a month later what was really going on: nothing.
For example, it cannot be ignored that in the previous period coalition parties offered farmers the space to vent their anger at a calculation tool that had been in existence for ten years without any fuss within the government.
Everyone has an interest in criticism, and if I understand Mark Wilmot correctly, he will be the first to agree that Aerius is not perfect. But that also means that politicians can deal with scientific uncertainties: that right recognizing those uncertainties is the best way to improve understanding and policy.
Nitrogen policy entered a new phase on Friday, this will be hard against hard, and you can hope that politicians from the previous phase will remember not to destroy instruments that you may still need.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 11 June 2022