NETHERLANDS Trends and Developments Contributed by: Davine Roessingh, Sebastian Hinse and Tom van der Rijt, De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek
trajectory would lead to a 45–55% emission reduction in 2030 compared to 1990. Second, the current geopolitical environment creates competing and compelling policy pressures – such as high energy costs for households and businesses – that illustrate the well-documented “time consist - ency problem” of climate policy: short-term pressure on governments to deviate from long-term commit - ments to ensure calibration with market circumstanc - es. On top of that, a push to rapidly increase defence spending to ensure the long-term safety of the Neth - erlands and the European continent has put additional pressure on other long-term interests, such as climate change. An example of this is that the Dutch gov - ernment is increasing domestic gas production from small Dutch gas fields in the interest of energy security and affordability. The government takes the view that this is consistent with its climate policy (and may be associated with fewer emissions than importing LNG), which focuses on reducing market-wide demand for fossil fuel, rather than on a decrease of national pro - duction as a standalone objective. The third challenge is that the Dutch electorate con - tinues to vote for parties that do not have climate change sufficiently high on their agenda. While poll - ing generally shows that the majority of voters care about climate change and prefer mitigation actions, the outcomes of recent elections do not reflect this. When court decisions order the Dutch State to take more stringent climate action, tension arises, as the electorate then tends to perceive this as courts taking a legislative role on the initiative of NGOs. This discus - sion is ongoing. These challenges add to the increasing recourse to judicial scrutiny. In January 2026, the District Court of The Hague issued its judgment in the Bonaire case. Inhabitants of Bonaire – a Caribbean island that forms part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and which is particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels – brought proceedings against the Dutch State. The court con - cluded that Dutch climate policies are insufficient and that the State is in violation of Article 8 ECHR in respect of the inhabitants of Bonaire: the mitigation and adaptation measures taken by the State, viewed as a whole, were found not to meet the State’s obliga -
tions in a UN context. The Dutch State announced it will appeal the decision. The Bonaire judgment For the purposes of this contribution, the Bonaire judg - ment merits discussion on two fundamental points. The first point concerns the court’s decision on the baseline year applied for the reductions envisaged. The court’s assessment is that the Dutch State, in for - mulating its climate policies, operates against a base - line that is not consistent with the applicable legal framework. The Netherlands’ 2030 target of a 55% net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is explicitly defined in the European Climate Law by reference to 1990 emission levels — as is the Paris Agreement’s accounting framework. The court finds that progress should be measured against a different, more recent baseline year (being 2019). This decision, however, ignores decades of reductions already achieved before 2019. This is not a technicality. It would move the goal posts post hoc and create divergence between national obligations across the EU. The court substantiates its baseline year choice by relying on an interpretation of two COP decisions (specifically the Glasgow Climate Pact and the Sharm el-Sheikh Implementation Plan). It is questionable whether these decisions provide sufficient legal basis for the court’s finding that the Dutch State must reduce its emissions by 43% in 2030 relative to the baseline year 2019. After all, COP decisions have a distinctly different pur - pose and legal status and are in many respects not intended to change, and are not capable of changing, the contents of the Paris Agreement nor the material agreement laid down therein. A second point of note is the fact that in its deci - sion, the court includes considerations on the aviation and shipping sectors. Following the Paris Agreement, emissions from international aviation and shipping are addressed through dedicated multilateral frame - works: the International Civil Aviation Organization’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for Inter - national Aviation (CORSIA), and the International Maritime Organization (IMO) strategy. These sectors are deliberately excluded from the domestic nation - ally determined contribution accounting of individual States precisely because they are trans-boundary by
59
CHAMBERS.COM
Powered by FlippingBook