Louis De Jaeger
Boards now treat climate and nature risk as material, but most still cannot link soil, food and land use to portfolio decisions in any concrete way. Sustainability strategy stops at carbon accounting and supplier audits, while the underlying assets, farmland, water, biodiversity, continue to degrade. The leaders who get this right turn regeneration into long-term yield. The ones who do not are quietly underwriting losses they have not yet booked.
Louis De Jaeger is a Belgian landscape designer, author and filmmaker who helps boards, investors and operators turn regeneration of soil, land and food systems into a long-term commercial strategy.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Louis De Jaeger
- He runs a working design practice, Commensalist, that has delivered regenerative projects from food forests and future-proof farms to vineyard hotels and private eco-islands, so the recommendations on stage are tied to built assets, not slideware.
- He frames regeneration as a financial proposition. Boards leave able to discuss soil, biodiversity and food systems as long-term yield and risk variables, not as CSR.
- He is one of the few sustainability voices who has also built infrastructure at scale, co-founding the Belgian night-train start-up Moonlight Express that merged into European Sleeper, which gives him direct credibility with leaders who care about how new green businesses actually get financed and operated.
- He brings a body of evidence from his own work: the FoodForest documentary, the book SOS: Save Our Soils, and over fifty opinion pieces in titles such as De Standaard, De Morgen and Knack. Audiences hear arguments that have already been pressure-tested in print and on screen.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Commensalist, a regenerative landscape architecture practice working on productive landscapes, regenerative farms and hospitality estates worldwide.
- Co-founder of the Food Forest Institute and of the ByeByeGrass biodiversity campaign in Belgium.
- Co-founder of Moonlight Express, the Belgian night-train start-up that merged into European Sleeper, now operating sleeper services from Brussels.
- Director of the award-winning documentary FoodForest (2022) and of the feature documentary Eat More Trees on the role of food forests in climate and food security.
- Author of SOS: Save Our Soils (2025) and of Design your own food forest, a technical reference on food forest design.
- Long-running opinion contributor to De Standaard, De Morgen, Knack, Knack Weekend and MO*, with more than fifty published columns since 2018.
Biography
Most boards now accept that climate, biodiversity and food security are material risks. Far fewer can describe what to actually do about the soil their supply chains depend on. Louis De Jaeger has spent the last decade closing that gap, designing the land and writing the case for it at the same time.
He runs Commensalist, a Belgian landscape architecture practice that designs regenerative projects from productive farms and food forests to vineyard hotels and private eco-islands. The work is built, not theoretical. Clients come to him because they need an asset that will still hold value in thirty years under heat, drought and tighter nature regulation.
Alongside the practice, he co-founded the Food Forest Institute and the ByeByeGrass campaign in Belgium, and made the documentaries FoodForest and Eat More Trees about the role of food forests in cooling the climate and rebuilding food systems. His 2025 book SOS: Save Our Soils sets out a direct argument that regenerative agriculture is the cheapest, most effective form of climate infrastructure available, and that current food and land policy is mispriced against it.
What makes him useful in a leadership room is the second track. With Moonlight Express, the night-train start-up he co-founded that merged into European Sleeper, he has been on the inside of building a green infrastructure business from a deck to operating trains. So when he talks to investors and operators about regeneration as a long-term asset class, the argument carries the weight of someone who has had to finance, license and run one.
Key speaking topics
- Regenerative agriculture and soil health
- Food forests and productive landscapes
- Climate, biodiversity and nature-based solutions
- Sustainable land use and food systems
- Regeneration as long-term asset strategy
- Sustainable hospitality and estate design
- Green infrastructure entrepreneurship
Ideal for
- Boards and investment committees pricing climate, nature and land-use risk into long-term portfolios
- CSOs, heads of sustainability and ESG leads moving beyond carbon accounting into soil, water and biodiversity
- Real estate, hospitality and agribusiness operators evaluating regenerative design for their own assets
- Founders and corporate venture teams backing food, agritech and green infrastructure businesses
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of regeneration that boards can use, distinct from offsetting and from generic ESG language.
- A clearer view of which sustainability assumptions and assets are likely to age badly over the next decade.
- Practical reference points from built projects: food forests, regenerative farms, hospitality estates, biodiversity campaigns.
- A founder’s account of how a green infrastructure business actually gets financed and run, drawn from Moonlight Express and European Sleeper.
- A sharper internal narrative for connecting climate, food and land strategy to commercial decisions.
Talks
A direct case that trees, soil and living systems are the cheapest available climate infrastructure, and what that means for how organisations price land, food and water.
Key takeaways:
- Why soil and biomass outperform most engineered carbon solutions on cost and time.
- How to read climate, food and water as a single connected risk on the balance sheet.
- Where corporate and investor capital can shift to back regeneration at scale.
Reframes regeneration for investors, developers and operators as a source of long-term yield rather than a cost line.
Key takeaways:
- The asset characteristics that make regenerative land hold value under climate stress.
- How hospitality, agriculture and real estate portfolios can be repositioned around regeneration.
- The financial logic that separates regenerative projects from conventional ESG narratives.
Uses the working reality of regenerative farming to challenge how leaders think about cycles, time horizons and resilience in their own organisations.
Key takeaways:
- What soil teaches about long-cycle decision making.
- How farmers manage uncertainty in ways most corporate planning cannot.
- Where leadership models built for quarterly results fail under climate pressure.
A practitioner walk-through of how ecological design raises guest experience, asset value and operating margin in hotels, vineyards and estates.
Key takeaways:
- The design choices that turn biodiversity into a guest-facing asset.
- How regenerative landscapes change the operating cost structure of hospitality estates.
- Examples drawn from vineyard hotels, eco-islands and hybrid agricultural estates.