Environmental groups preparing dozens of lawsuits against Dutch nitrogen policy
Mobilization for the Environment (MOB) and Vereniging Leefmilieu are preparing dozens of new lawsuits against the Dutch government’s nitrogen policy. An expert they consulted concluded that it would be “impossible” to achieve the legal nitrogen reduction targets with the plans that Agriculture Minister Femke Wiersma presented last month. The environmental groups gave the Minister two weeks to come up with a serious nitrogen policy, or they will take it to court, the Volkskrant reports.
According to MOB, the BBB Minister is ignoring the recent court ruling ordering the government ot protect at least 50 percent of the most endangered nitrogen-sensitive nature from nitrogen by the end of 2030.
The organization asked engineer Ton Brouwer from the Gispoint agency to calculate how much nitrogen reduction Wiersma’s plans would approximately achieve. Among other things, Brouwer concluded that Wiersma’s biggest concrete measure - creating nitrogen-poor buffer zones of 250 meters around the Peel and the Veluwe nature reserves - will contribute less than 0.5 percent to the minimum required emission reduction of agriculture.
MOB has been taking legal action against the government over its failure to reduce nitrogen emissions and save Dutch nature for years. The environmental group won almost all these cases, because European nature conservation laws are on its side. Its biggest success was in 2019, when the Council of State declared the government’s Nitrogen Action Program (PAS), introduced in 2015, invalid because it conflicted with the European Bird and Habitat Directives.
One consequence of the 2019 ruling was that thousands of farmers who had expanded their livestock without a permit based on the PAS rules suddenly became illegal. Provinces have so far refused to enforce the permit requirement on these farmers because the government has promised to legalize the affected farmers. But this leniency is becoming increasingly impossible for provinces to maintain, especially now that Wiersma is not taking concrete action to reduce nitrogen emissions.
MOB has not started any new legal proceedings against the PAS farmers in the past two years, to give the government time to solve the problem, the organization’s lawyer, Valentijn Wösten, told the newspaper. But now that Wiersma has failed again with her long-awaited nitrogen policy, MOB’s patience has run out.
MOB and Leefmilieu gave Wiersma two more weeks to come up with concrete and effective measures to reduce nitrogen emissions and protect vulnerable nature. If she fails to do so, the organizations will file dozens of lawsuits aimed at the government, mega stables, peak polluters, and PAS farmers. Wösten said that not all PAS farmers are innocent victims of government policy. According to him, some farmers illegally expanded their livestock before 2015 and then filed a PAS report to “legalize” this secret expansion afterward.
“After six years of research and consultation, it is sufficiently clear what needs to be done, and it comes down to making decisions and implementing them,” MOB wrote in its ultimatum to Wiersma. “You leave us no other option than to ask the court to intervene again. The year 2030 is steadily approaching. The decisions cannot be postponed any longer, because sufficient time is needed for implementation.”
