Commercial flights from Lelystad Airport will take another decade, experts think
The Jetten I Cabinet promised in its coalition agreement to use Lelystad Airport as an air base for Defense as well as for 10,000 commercial flights per year, to the delight of the municipality, province, and owner Sciphol Airport. But according to experts, those commercial flights won’t be possible for another decade at least.
Lelystad Airport does not have an environmental permit, and the chance of one being granted in the coming years is slim to none, experts told RTL Nieuws.
Like with almost everything else in the Netherlands, the problem is nitrogen. The Netherlands must reduce nitrogen deposition to a level at which at least 50% of its nature reserves are not at risk of deterioration by 2030, and 74 percent by 2035. Earlier this month, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) called it “highly unlikely” that the Netherlands will hit those legally established targets.
“The total nitrogen deposition is far too high in many places in the Netherlands,” Raoul Beunen, a professor of environmental law at Utrecht University, told RTL Nieuws. “The commissioning of Lelystad Airport for wholesale traffic will cause an increase in the Natura 2000 area of the Veluwe and thereby contribute to its deterioration.”
Opening Lelystad Airport to commercial flights could also harm two other nature reserves, De Wieden and De Weerribben. But the Veluwe alone already poses an insurmountable problem, Beunen told the broadcaster. “The excessively high nitrogen deposition there and the very unfavorable conservation status of protected nature mean that projects causing an increase in nitrogen deposition can simply not be permitted.”
The government could compensate for the nitrogen deposition caused by opening Lelystad Airport by buying out farms, for example. But for the foreseeable future, any nitrogen gain the government achieves with such buyouts must first go towards nature restoration, not new projects.
Only once large-scale government measures to reduce nitrogen start to have a serious effect, will there be space again for new projects like allowing commercial flights from Lelystad Airport. And that won’t happen any time soon.
“The Cabinet does not intend to halve ammonia emissions, the major source of nitrogen deposition, until 2035,” Beunen said. He doesn’t expect that Lelystad Airport will get its environmental permit before then.
