Results of the Netherlands' Climate Policy Implementation Plan

The plan starts from the asssumption that a reduction of 25 Mtonnes should be achieved with domestic measures. This Working Paper presents CPB's analysis of this Plan.

We conclude that the effects of the Plan are doubtful, because the Plan contains many uncertain policy proposals. Uncertain measures are instruments about which will be decided later or instruments which have not been described concretely.

Measures of which the consequences are in doubt have also been considered uncertain. A specific example is the voluntary agreement which the Cabinet wants to reach with the owners of coal-fired power plants.

'Certain' policies lead to a reduction of emissions by roughly 13 Mtonnes. Including the uncertain measures could make the target attainable. Annual structural public expenditures amount to 850 million guilders as a consequence of the 'certain' measures; including the uncertain measures these expenditures amount to approximately 1.25 billion guilders. This is caused to a large extent by 800 million guilders loss of Regulatory Energy Tax income, caused by a substantial rise of the production of renewable energy.

In the long run GDP will be between 0.2% and 0.3% lower than in the Global Competition scenario, which was used in the analysis as the base-line scenario. The effects on the level of employment vary between 0.1 and 0.2%. For individual economic sectors the consequences could be more drastic. In the glasshouse horticulture sector the decline of the volume of production could reach 5%.