Amsterdam has become the first capital city in the world to ban public advertisements for meat and fossil fuel products. The policy officially started on May 1 and affects ads across the city’s public spaces.
The ban includes advertisements for beef, pork, chicken and fish products. Ads for airlines, cruises, gasoline-powered cars and fossil fuel home heating contracts are also no longer allowed. Promotions for faraway vacation destinations are included too.
The move came from political parties GreenLeft and the Party for the Animals, which pushed for the ordinance in Amsterdam’s city council. City councillor Anneke Veenhoff from GreenLeft said the city’s climate policies did not match the ads people were seeing every day.
“If you spend lots of tax money and have lots of policies trying to manage climate change in Amsterdam, why would you rent out your public walls to exactly the opposite?” she said.
She also compared the advertising to addiction. “If you’re trying to get rid of an addiction, it’s not very handy to see it everywhere.”
Amsterdam had already tried limiting fossil fuel ads back in 2020. At that time, the city council passed a motion asking advertising companies to stop showing fossil fuel ads when contracts got renewed. But many of those contracts lasted years, so the ads stayed visible around the city anyway. Mostly in metro stations and transit areas.
The new ordinance is broader. It applies whether the city has contracts with advertising operators or not. Officials said this closes loopholes from the earlier policy.
The ban now covers city-controlled advertising spaces like bus shelters, metro stations and freestanding ad panels along sidewalks. Private businesses are still allowed to advertise products outside their own stores in a limited way. Digital advertising online is untouched by the rules.
Amsterdam is not the only Dutch city moving in this direction. Haarlem announced a ban on most meat advertising in public spaces in 2022, and it became law two years later alongside restrictions on fossil fuel ads. The Hague became the first city in the world to create a legally binding fossil fuel advertising ban in 2025.
More than 50 cities worldwide are either banning or planning to ban fossil fuel and meat advertising. Stockholm is expected to introduce a similar policy this summer. Cities like Sydney and Florence have also supported related restrictions.
Supporters of the Amsterdam ban argue that advertising helps normalize carbon-heavy lifestyles. Reint Jan Renes, a behavioral psychologist who studies sustainability in cities, said he often feels frustrated walking through Amsterdam because of how crowded public spaces are with advertisements.
“We have this very, very beautiful old city, and you really have to look past all those signs that try to sell you something,” Renes said.
Researchers from Greenpeace Netherlands and the New Weather Institute estimated that car and airline advertisements in the European Union in 2019 could be linked to up to 122 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. The argument behind bans like Amsterdam’s is that fewer ads may slowly change public attitudes about flying, driving and consumption. Though nobody really expects people to change overnight.
Critics say the policy limits commercial freedom. The Dutch Advertisers’ Association argued that bans like these go against principles of free commercial communication. Travel industry groups and meat industry representatives also criticized Amsterdam’s decision and called it an attempt to influence consumer behavior.
A Dutch court recently upheld a similar ban in The Hague after travel groups challenged it. The court ruled that municipalities can restrict advertising when climate and public health interests are involved.
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