A visit by the monitor of the European Commission

For the past four years, we have been working to plant as many trees as possible throughout Europe and to engage people in our tree-planting efforts. To check on our progress, we are visited every once in a while by monitors sent by the European Commission. This summer we met with our monitors in the Netherlands, to show them around some of our projects and to discuss our progress and our future. 

Together with the monitors we visited our projects at the Mariënwaerdt estate close to Beesd and at food forest Lingehout close to Geldermalsen in the Netherlands. These projects are exemplary of the variety of projects that Life Terra supports throughout Europe.

For instance, at Mariënwaerdt we help to reforest former agricultural lands by planting new biodiverse forests, but we also plant a mix of native trees at former monoculture tree plantations that have been devastated by diseases.

On the other hand, at Lingehout we have supported the creation of a food forest that acts as an example of how agroforestry can be both an ecologically and economically viable future for agriculture. 

At both projects, our trees were doing quite well. Especially food forest Lingehout has an exceptionally high survival rate, as such agroforestry projects are usually maintained more thoroughly. Our nature restoration projects at Mariënwaerdt are also showing promising results, especially if compared to what these planting sites would have looked like without our reforestation efforts. 

Of course, we still have room for improvement and we are constantly trying to improve our processes to ensure that we are able to plant as many trees in Europe as possible while keeping in mind to plant the right tree in the right place.

We think it was a very fruitful meeting and we will be working on implementing the suggestions made by the monitors of the European Commission in future!