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Environmental quality is a major political issue in the Netherlands. The deposition of nitrogen on nature areas has been too high and there are high-stakes in both political and legal fights on numbers and models, for instance, for the deposition of nitrogen. , who was previously Chief Scientist of the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency from 2011–2014 before he joined Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²ÊÖÐÌØÍø, has recently been asked to assist both sides of the science–policy interface.

The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management engaged Professor Petersen, late 2022, as a private consultant to produce an independent expert judgement on the underpinning of the maximum calculation distance in project-specific calculations of nitrogen depositions, for use in a case before the Council of State (the Dutch Supreme Court for administrative law). The ruling is scheduled for Wednesday 5th April 2023.

This month the RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) has appointed Professor Petersen as Chair of the Evaluation Committee for its Centre for Environmental Quality. The centre has, as its main task, to monitor air, soil and groundwater quality, emissions to air and water, and deposition on land and water, and it aims to be a ‘trusted advisor’ within the government. The evaluation will commence in the summer of 2023.

Professor Petersen joined Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²ÊÖÐÌØÍø’s Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) full-time in September 2014 after more than 13 years’ working as a scientific adviser on environment and infrastructure policy within the Dutch Government. He has been a member of STEaPP's Leadership Team from 2014–2018 (in 2016-17 he was Acting Head of Department), and again from 2022 (as Director of Education). In the 2023/24 academic year he will co-lead modules on Climate, Innovation and Sustainability Policy and on . He will also be contributing to other modules within STEaPP, including Science Diplomacy.

Professor Petersen is also Editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science.

Updates (as of 28th August 2024)

• On 28 August 2024, IPO (the Association of Provinces of the Netherlands) published a commissioned (in Dutch) on the assessment threshold produced by TNO (the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) and the University of Amsterdam. At the request of the provinces, Professor Petersen was a member of the scientific sounding board for this study. On the basis of this study and his experiences as chair of the RIVM evaluation committee, he has been able to focus and strengthen the case for changing the assessment threshold from 0.005 mol/ha/year to 1 mol/ha/year (see his updated expert judgement under ‘Links’).

• On 21 June 2024, the RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment) published the  of the Evaluation Committee for its Centre for Environmental Quality, which was chaired by Professor Petersen and held its site visit on 21 and 22 December 2023. With respect to present model use for generating project-specific calculations of nitrogen depositions in the context of permitting, the committee concludes that given the evidence standard that is required this constitutes a mis-use of models and that RIVM should, in collaboration with others, seek to clarify lowest boundaries for the assessment threshold (also to prevent such model mis-use after the model shifts to another organisation).

• On 21 December 2023, the Dutch House of Representatives voted in favour of a  (in Dutch) to have the Government change the assessment threshold from 0.005 mol/ha/year to 1 mol/ha/year, citing Professor Petersen’s expert judgement (1 mol/ha/year was the lower bound of his recommended range). And on 16 May 2024, the Dutch  (in Dutch) included the same number as a lower bound.

• In June 2023, Professor Petersen was asked as a follow-up by De Nieuwe Denktank (a Dutch thinktank) to produce another independent expert judgement, this time on the scientific underpinning of the assessment threshold used in project-specific calculations of nitrogen depositions. This led to inclusion of his expert judgement in a  (in Dutch) published by De Nieuwe Denktank on the 26th October 2023. Their report pleas for another nitrogen case to be brought before the Council of State, which they expect will then be decided along similar lines as for the earlier case. In the second expert judgement, Professor Petersen had argued that the current assessment threshold in the Netherlands of 0.005 mol/ha/year cannot be maintained from a scientific, legal and policy perspective; a new assessment threshold should be chosen that is between 200 and 7,000 times higher.

• On 5 April 2023, the Council of State made extensive reference in its  (in Dutch) to Professor Petersen’s expert judgement and adopted his argument that uncertainty generally prohibits the use of calculations of nitrogen depositions from individual sources beyond 25 km.

Links

• Professor Petersen’s ‘Expert judgement on the underpinning of the maximum calculation distance in project-specific calculations of nitrogen depositions’, November 2022 (English version, Dutch version).Ìý
• Professor Petersen’s ‘Expert judgement on the underpinning of the assessment threshold used in project-specific calculations of nitrogen depositions’, July 2023 (English version, Dutch version)Ìý[updated August 2024 (English version, Dutch version)].