SDI Convergence - Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie - KNAW

Legal Atlas approach, except for petitioning. The Greek partners in the project also
seem to be faced with a less rule-oriented culture. The standardisation efforts in
Europe may result in decreasing these differences when it comes to enforcement and
comparison of policies in Europe.
8. RELEVANCY FOR INSPIRE MAPPING FOR DUTCH PROVINCES
The Dutch provinces have carried out an impact analysis of INSPIRE (Woudenberg et
al., 2009). This impact analyses mentions several ambiguities with the new infrastructure,
starting with the definition of ‘Protected sites’ according to the International Union
for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN):
“A Protected Site is an area of land and/or sea especially dedicated to the protection
and maintenance of biological diversity, and of natural and associated cultural resources,
and managed through legal or other effective means”.
The scope of this definition raises a discussion among policy advisors how to apply the
INSPIRE directive wisely. If too many ‘protected sites’ are defined it tends to weaken
enforcement possibilities and reporting to the European Commission and the Shared
Environmental Information System (SEIS) may become tedious. If too few areas are
being identified as protected the province will lose those ‘sites’ it wants to protect. The
latter occurs because of the hierarchical legal effect of European directives. ‘Lesser’
legal regimes become less useful to oppose against economic interests. The Ecological
main infrastructure (Ecologische Hoofd Structuur) in the Netherlands, that was
meant to become the vehicle to ensure less fragmentation of green areas in an urban
country, may well become negligible in it’s effect given the greater impact of
Natura2000 areas. The Dutch provinces have several examples of non-intended effects.
The regulation of salt and sweat water balance, for example, indicated that one
province was obliged to subsidise farmers for lack of sweet water while those farmers
had one of the best crops in Europe. The Dutch provinces do not want to lose this need
for flexibility due to inflexible standardisation. These findings are relevant for our research
on Legal Atlas. INSPIRE is an interesting problem area creating many challenges
for the governments. INSPIRE not only states what environmental indicators
have to be measured but it also states how these environmental indicators should be
measured. As a consequence INSPIRE has implications for governments since it may
impact future spatial plans.
It appears that often the visualisation of map layers for environmental purposes, like
with INSPIRE, creates a legal challenge; the feeding time of geese in the Netherlands
is six months at most. Then they fly to Scandinavia. The map showing areas that are
protected for the sake of those geese should convey the temporal factor which is unusual
in legal constraints mapping.
For Dutch provinces, the biggest problems of European standardisation efforts like IN-
SPIRE concern the harmonisation of calculating methods behind the layers. The Dutch
provinces are not sure that all environmental indicators are calculated in the same way
in Europe. This envisioned level of variety requires more explanation, flexibility and
enough administrative room for local interpretation. Even within the same country it
takes time and effort to understand the different ways to calculate sound level measurements,
visualisations and mappings. Water quality differs with temperature. Ecological
complexity defies simple arithmetic’s. There is a relationship between legislation
and methods of calculation; changes in calculation methods at the European level may
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