Nitrogen Deposition Dashboard helps The Hague with ambitious housing project

The Municipality of The Hague is faced with an enormous housing demand and needs to build thousands of new homes in the coming decades. But The Hague is also in a unique situation as far as nitrogen: the city is surrounded by protected Natura 2000 sites. An excess of nitrogen in these areas would cause many unique plants and animals to disappear. Its location close to these nitrogen-sensitive areas makes carrying out large housing developments in The Hague particularly difficult. This is why the municipality sought to have the effectiveness of various potential nitrogen-reducing measures calculated. The Nitrogen Deposition Dashboard was used.

The Nitrogen Deposition Dashboard

Alongside the usual nitrogen deposition study and report carried out by Witteveen+Bos, the Nitrogen Deposition Dashboard was developed for the municipality. The dashboard is an online platform containing measures that the municipality can take to create nitrogen deposition reductions for housing or any other developments. The municipality can also add, change or remove measures.

Room for housing development

The aim of implementing reduction measures is to free up space for housing developments within the Municipality of The Hague, with respect to both the construction and use phases. Calculating the effects of the various measures made it possible to see how the municipality could create the necessary nitrogen reductions.

Measures

In the dashboard, users see various nitrogen-reducing measures. These could include using electric vehicles to transport goods, making changes to parking areas, or introducing speed reductions. The municipality can also add new measures to the dashboard.

The dashboard has allowed the municipality to easily create and calculate the effects of different scenarios and determine which of these are realistic, effective and desirable.