06 July 2023 at 00:00
Highways, golf courses, Vinex neighborhoods and the world’s second largest agricultural exporter. Somewhere in between is Dutch nature: highly fragmented. There has been a plan for years to reconnect those green shreds, but the implementation is lagging behind.
Nature policy should lie more with the provinces and less with The Hague. The government decided this ten years ago, when the Nature Pact was signed. The decentralized approach should lead to 80,000 hectares of new nature, which is mainly intended to improve the connections between existing nature.
Such compounds can increase plant and animal habitats and thus help restore biodiversity. The government also hoped to increase citizens’ involvement with nature and to better connect nature with the economy.
Clarity needed about sustainable agriculture
Ten years later, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and Wageningen University & Research take stock. The goals for nature enhancement should officially not be achieved until 2027, but at the current pace this will not be possible.
That is what the authors of the report published on Thursday state Lessons from 10 years of the Nature Pact. That does not mean that nothing is happening: since 2013, slightly more than half of the area of new nature has been created.
The researchers also warn that nature restoration requires more than expanding and connecting nature areas. Ecosystems must also be given the opportunity to recover from, for example, desiccation and nitrogen pollution.
Above all, this requires more sustainable agriculture and more “nature-inclusive” agriculture. This in turn means that farmers need clarity and financial support. And that is precisely where the national government is needed again.
Plan for ecological connections dates from 1990 and was scrapped in 2010
Ecological connections in the densely populated Netherlands have a long lead time. We are frontrunners in devising and building wildlife viaducts and toad tunnels. But the large-scale plan that will allow people and nature to live side by side again has a more difficult history.
In 2013, when the Nature Pact was launched, this network was called the Netherlands Nature Network (NNN). But the plan already existed in 1990, then under the name Ecological Main Structure (EHS). The implementation of the EHS was scrapped in 2010 by Henk Bleker, State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Agriculture in the Rutte I cabinet.
For example, the Netherlands moves back and forth in terms of policy. And “despite increased efforts”, the connecting nature network will not be ready in 2027 either, according to the new evaluation.
2023-07-05 22:00:35
#Connecting #nature #areas #smoothly #climate
