Half a millennia ago, forests covered much of the Iberian peninsula. But that soon changed. Centuries of wars and invasions, agricultural expansion and woodcutting for charcoal and shipping wiped out most of the woods and transformed places like Matamorisca, a small village in northern Spain, into degraded landscapes.

The region’s arid climate and depleted soils would be a recipe for disaster in your average reforestation program, but for the Amsterdam-based Land Life Company it’s an ideal place. “We typically operate where nature does not come back by itself,” says Jurrian Ruys, its CEO. “We go where there are rougher conditions in terms of weather, with rough or very hot summers.”

In Matamorisca, they intervened in 17 barren hectares owned by the regional government and peppered them with their signature device: a biodegradable cardboard donut they call the cocoon which can hold 25 litres of water underground to aid a seedling’s first year. Around 16,000 oaks, ashes, walnuts, rowans, and whitebeams were planted in May 2018, and the company reports that 96% of them survived that year’s scorching summer without extra irrigation, a critical milestone for a young tree.

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“Does nature return by itself?” asks Arnout Asjes, Land Life Company’s chief technology officer, who oversees a mix of drone and satellite imagery, big data analysis, soil enhancement, QR tagging and site-specific tree configuration designs. “Probably, but it can take decades or hundreds of years, so we are speeding things up.”