Justice & Paix

Hundreds of climate activists breached a runway Saturday at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport to try to stop private jets from taking off, in the latest demonstration by protesters aimed at drawing attention to the climate crisis. Greenpeace Netherlands said “more than 500” Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion activists were at the airport, one of Europe’s largest, on Saturday afternoon, in a press release. A spokesperson for the Schiphol security forces could not confirm that figure.

Urgenda has become synonymous with a particular kind of lawsuit brought against a state for inaction on climate change. What impact it has had both in the Netherlands and internationally?

Programme to tackle pollution crisis caused by an overload of manure faces fierce opposition from farmers

After the highest Dutch administrative court found in 2019 that the government was breaking EU law by not doing enough to reduce excess nitrogen in vulnerable natural areas, the country has been battling what it is calling a “nitrogen crisis”.Now civil servants have drawn up proposals which include slashing livestock numbers by 30%, one of the most radical plans of its kind in Europe.

A highly corrosive bacterium which can eat through iron and steel at a rate of knots may have reached the Dutch side of the Ghent to Terneuzen canal, scientists have warned. The MIC (microbiologically induced corrosion) bacteria were discovered by researchers from the maritime institute at Antwerp and the universities of Ghent and Leuven.

Plastics in the marine environment have become a major concern because of their persistence at sea, and adverse consequences to marine life and potentially human health. Implementing mitigation strategies requires an understanding and quantification of marine plastic sources, taking spatial and temporal variability into account. Here we present a global model of plastic inputs from rivers into oceans based on waste management, population density and hydrological information. Our model is calibrated against measurements available in the literature. We estimate that between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic waste currently enters the ocean every year from rivers, with over 74% of emissions occurring between May and October. The top 20 polluting rivers, mostly located in Asia, account for 67% of the global total. The findings of this study provide baseline data for ocean plastic mass balance exercises, and assist in prioritizing future plastic debris monitoring and mitigation strategies. Rivers provide a m