Kees Hoogendijk

About Kees Hoogendijk

Kees Hoogendijk (born 1946) received his Masters degree in chemical engineering from the Technical University in Delft, the Netherlands in 1970. He held several senior positions in the oil and chemical industry in the Netherlands and the UK prior to co-founding a petrochemicals trading company (LOGA) 1985. In 1992 LOGA was bought by ENRON, an oil and gas company in the USA.

After having worked for two years in the head office of ENRON in Houston, Kees decided to leave ENRON in 1994 to start his own venture capital firm KEGADO, a company which focussed on implementing solutions addressing climate change.

In 2002 KEGADO co-founded the Climate Neutral Group (CNG), a company which markets CO2 certificates originating from reforestation projects in Africa, South-East Asia and South America, which were created by the FACE Foundation, which started these projects in 1990. In 2009 KEGADO co-founded FACE the FUTURE, a company which executes forest restoration projects worldwide, continuing and expanding the activities of the FACE Foundation. During the period 2014-2016 Kees was CEO of FACE The FUTURE.

Seeding Positive Change

In this period it became obvious to Kees that the restoration of nature is of great importance to the future of our civilisation. The large scale deforestation that took place in the last 100 years is the main cause of climate change. The increased incidence of droughts, floods, hurricanes, land-slides, forest fires and climate change is a direct consequence of deforestation.

The deforestation is the result of the increase in animal farming across the world. As the world population grows and affluence rises more meat is produced. This puts further pressure on forests and agricultural lands. This will inevitably lead to local and global water, food and refugee crises in the years to come, unless we take appropriate and decisive action as soon as possible.

By unifying detailed scientific research in many diverse fields of science Kees was able to find a relative simple solution to all these complex challenges. In 2017 Kees co-founded the Unifying Fields Foundation to start a new grass-roots movement by inviting people to restore nature while at the same time making a lifestyle switch to a whole food plant based lifestyle.

For every presentation the Unifying Fields Foundation will plant ten trees in a Food Forrest in The Netherlands.