“I always said: I don’t know anyone like you,” says Jan Rotmans, co-founder of Urgenda and professor in the field of sustainability and transitions. “Then you should look more closely,” Marjan said, “because they are there. But if I’m honest: I never found them. In a football team she would be a striker, playmaker and last man.”
Friends, acquaintances and climate lawyers lack superlatives for what Marjan Minnesma has meant to the climate movement. She died of breast cancer on Friday at the age of 59.
Minnesma was a big name, and not only because of the climate lawsuit against the Dutch government that Urgenda won in 2015. The organization thus forced the government to implement a stricter climate policy. The ‘Urgenda verdict’ inspired dozens of other climate cases worldwide.
The fact that they both became terminally ill is still “bizarre” for the 65-year-old Rotmans – who himself has metastatic prostate cancer. In the 25 years that Rotmans knew her, he never saw Minnesma sick – before her diagnosis. They didn’t have time for being sick. “We thought we could take on the whole world, that we were immortal. We threw so much energy into it.”
They kept the conversations about their illness short; Minnesma didn’t like self-pity, says Rotmans. “We supported each other by cheering each other up: look what I’m doing, look what you’re doing. Our work, our daily things. She was too busy to grieve.” Yet almost every day there was a text back and forth: how are you? “She had severe treatments and often had to go to Belgium for it. I still had some perspective, she hardly; it is amazing how she dealt with it.”
Minnesma studied business administration, philosophy and law. She worked at Shell for a short time, but thought change was happening too slowly at the oil giant. She had worked at Greenpeace and the Vrije Universiteit, among others, when Rotmans asked her to join a research institute for transition science affiliated with Erasmus University.
She also stayed there initially looking for her role, says Rotmans. “She could have easily obtained a PhD and become a professor. But knowledge in itself she didn’t find it interesting. How much of that knowledge is actually used in practice? she asked.”
That is why they founded Urgenda: to put knowledge from climate research into practice. Minnesma became director, Rotmans chairman. They developed a kind of agenda for the future of the Netherlands with forty serious ideas for sustainability. This was widely reported in the press. “Everything came together, this was her role. She completely radiated.”
Everywhere in the world I go and give presentations, Urgenda is the first thing mentioned. It has become a blueprint, its own category: it is called ‘Urgenda-style cases’
In the stories about Minnesma in the press, Rotmans misses her “other side”. The seriousness of climate change “makes people think we are only serious.” In these days after her death, what flashes through his mind is how incredibly good she was at having fun.
“When traveling through the country past sustainable leaders, we always organized a colorful evening. Then we would sing songs together, such as Het land van Maas en Waal,” says Rotmans over the telephone. She also found dancing “really fun”. On the number ‘Relight my Fire‘ she could go wild. “It seemed like a different Marjan, as if everything had fallen away from her.”
Climate case
When lawyer Roger Cox approaches Urgenda with his ideas about how law offers starting points for sustainability, Rotmans has doubts. “Marjan, also a lawyer herself, said that she saw something in it.” With her husband and Cox, she spent a lot of time building the case against the state. “Everyone advised us against it. We both have that: if everyone advises you against it, then you do it.”
More people from the climate movement recall this image. That’s why climate activist Hannah Prins found Minnesma so inspiring, because she just did it. “You can keep talking forever, but you can also just do things. I now work for a legal climate NGO that conducts all kinds of climate lawsuits and that wouldn’t have been possible without her.”
Former GroenLinks MP Liesbeth van Tongeren admires Minnesma because she always looked at what was possible. Van Tongeren was also director at Greenpeace and knew her from the sustainability world. “You see that today’s young climate activists are sometimes overwhelmed by the negative figures about the climate problem. They have the idea: we must stop all fossil emissions within about fifteen years.”
Minnesma had the talent to think smaller, Van Tongeren believes. “Then, for example, she started working with a small club to help farmers with herb-rich grassland, without thinking: what does such a grassland help?”
Van Tongeren also points to another example of her pragmatism. Around 2010, solar panels were still very expensive in the Netherlands. Minnesma decided to open up the market and imported about fifty thousand cheaper solar panels with inverters from China. It was a major financial risk for both her and Urgenda, but it worked: the solar panels were sold and other parties also started purchasing them collectively. As a result, the price fell by a third and the market grew considerably.
Groundbreaking
Minnesma will probably be remembered most in the environmental movement for the groundbreaking climate case. In 2015, Urgenda won the lawsuit against the Dutch State, and in 2018 the foundation was successful on appeal. That case also attracted criticism: didn’t the judge put too much of a focus on politics?
Yet the case was widely followed abroad, says Tim Bleeker, associate professor and coordinator of the Climate Law master’s program at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. “Everywhere in the world I go and give presentations, Urgenda is the first thing mentioned. It has become a blueprint, its own category: it is called ‘Urgenda-style cases’.”
The more technically legal name for it is framework cases. “The core is that the danger caused by climate change activates all kinds of legal obligations,” says Bleeker. The lawsuits are based on the duty of care under our liability law.
Urgenda demanded that Dutch emissions be limited by at least 25 percent in 2020 compared to 1990. “The demand was actually: there must be a total plan to ensure that we are in line with climate goals,” says Bleeker. “Left or right, how you do it is up to you, but this is the lower limit.”
Important cases that were subsequently won, such as from the Swiss Climatic juniors that were ruled right by the European Court of Human Rights on Swiss climate policy were partly based on Urgenda.
The case that Milieudefensie has filed against Shell is also a translation of Urgenda to the business community. “The claim is the same,” says Bleeker. “Your actions are not sustainable in a world where we are trying to prevent dangerous climate change.”
It is difficult to measure how much the Urgenda case itself could have helped in concrete terms against climate change. “The Dutch government has achieved the reduction target of 25 percent in 2020,” says Bleeker, “Partly due to additional policy such as more offshore wind, and partly due to ‘luck’ with the corona crisis.”
With Minnesma, Bleeker believes, the climate movement has lost a “titan”. She could have “broke off the debate, especially now that everything is locked down.” He sees that climate does not receive the attention it deserves and has competition from other crises. “On the one hand, the energy crisis gives an impetus to sustainability, on the other hand, countries and leaders are distracted.”
Urgenda, says Rotmans, started as an answer to what we were missing: a more radical movement that really wants to get things moving. “Marjan was always about renewing yourself, looking for new ways. Never giving up and becoming part of what you want to change.”
How should the environmental movement proceed? “She would say: come on, we need all the time. Don’t accept that something can’t be done.”
