No More Meat Billboards in Amsterdam
Amsterdam has done something most governments are too timid to attempt.
From the 1st of May 2026, the city will prohibit outdoor advertising for meat and fossil fuel products across public spaces. Billboards. Bus stops. Digital screens. If it promotes the use of animals for food or the burning of fossil fuels, it will not be plastered across the streets.
Inside shops and on private property, businesses can still advertise. But the public square is no longer free real estate for industries driving ecological collapse.
The motion passed with a clear majority in the municipal council. It was introduced by the Party for the Animals alongside the Green/Left party. This was not symbolic. It was structural. A recognition that climate breakdown is not just about emissions, but about what we normalise.
City officials were clear. Regulation must target both energy and food systems.
That matters.
Because meat production is not a side issue. It is central. The majority of food-system emissions come from animal agriculture. Yet these products are marketed as ordinary, necessary, neutral.
They are not.
Opponents argue this limits commercial speech. Advertising associations warn of legal complications. Existing contracts may be challenged. Similar policies have already been tested in Dutch courts and upheld. National government appears unwilling to follow.
None of that changes the underlying fact: public infrastructure does not exist to subsidise industries that accelerate planetary destabilisation.
Amsterdam has also set a target of 50% plant-based consumption by 2050. Currently, around 60% of dietary protein in the Netherlands comes from animals. The Dutch Health Council advises reversing that ratio.
This is not radical. It is overdue.
For decades, fossil fuel companies and animal agriculture have relied on saturation marketing to manufacture consent. To present high-emission products as culture, identity, tradition.
Remove the advertising and something shifts. The illusion of inevitability weakens.
No one is banning private consumption. What is being challenged is the assumption that the public realm must amplify industries built on extraction and exploitation.
Amsterdam has recognised something other cities still avoid: if you are serious about climate targets, you cannot keep promoting the very products that make those targets impossible.
This is not about optics.
It is about refusing to let the use of animals and the burning of fossil fuels remain the default setting of society.