After the biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis and the nitrogen crisis, we now also have a water crisis. Let us reformulate it positively: we have a nitrogen task, a climate task, a biodiversity task and a water task. We could make this list longer, depending on who is holding the pen.

So there are plenty of tasks, as well as money. The funds are loaded with resources. But do we also have the instruments and organizational strength to tackle these challenges? To ask the question is to answer it. No, we don’t have that. Certainly not when it comes to the preservation and sustainable development of our rural areas, the quality of which is deteriorating rapidly.

Strangely enough, we still have a wonderful and effective instrument, unique to the Netherlands: legal land consolidation. Or as we like to say at Triple E: land consolidation. But we no longer actually use this instrument, because ten years ago we smugly noted ‘that the Netherlands was finished’ and ‘it could have done with an ounce less’. And after all, we had a voluntary plot exchange, right?

The Green Christmas Lecture that we are organizing together with the Land Registry on December 21 in the Koepelkerk in Arnhem will be about the necessity and benefits that legal land consolidation offers in solving the massive challenges we have in our rural area. And in our opinion, this can also include tasks in the areas of soil, food supply, recreation, housing and energy.

The timing is of course wonderful because then we will have the elections behind us and we can discuss what hopeful message we will give this Christmas to the new cabinet that is in the making. We are currently working hard on the program, on the delicious Nat Goud beer that we give to the participants as a new tradition and there is a new booklet by Tom Bade about the social aspects of land consolidation for everyone.

Admission is free, but registration is required and can be done at lotte@triplee.nl. And for those who want to prepare themselves mentally, we have a link here to an episode of Bladgroen in which Tom Bade explains what makes the instrument so beautiful and what the opportunities are.