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Show me your problem, show me your theory of change, show me what you’re going to do, and then show to me in three years that you fixed the problem. And that’s completely different paradigm than transforming systems, as you know. So surprise, surprise, that’s what nonprofits primarily are resigned to doing in order to keep the fuel. It’s easier for a guy like me to say that who spent 20 years on Wall Street, than my kids who are trying to figure out how to build a career. And so I think we need to understand what’s at regenerative finance work here, even if it’s at a subconscious level.
The Economic (& Environmental & Health) Case for Regenerative Farming & Food
This keeps plastics out of landfills, oceans, and waterways while producing https://www.xcritical.com/ profitable products. There are examples of oil and gas infrastructure being reused or retrofitted to create a new business opportunity, such as the Malaysian oil platform that has been converted into a resort and scuba diving tourist destination (New York Post2016). In the US Gulf of Mexico, the Rigs to Reef program has enabled end-of-life platform substructures that become covered in coral and host teeming biodiversity to be relocated to provide long-term habitat for fish, creating a vibrant sport-fishing industry.
- So if we’re going to transition the global economy and survive as a species, we need to find ourselves a new source of prosperity for not just humanity, but all living beings.
- So what we need to do is, find the flywheels that are regenerative, and then, throw energy at them, which is people, and money, and expertise, and help them to spread that energy in their bioregions.
- This economic model advocates that countries, companies, investors and consumers take a nature positive approach.
- And what we need to do is, so there’s going to be interrelationships between all of those projects.
- The most powerful and destructive, both constructive and destructive enterprise in the history of humanity, and there’s no relationship between the owner and that enterprise.
- 97% of surveyed growers reported increased resilience to extreme weather such as drought and heavy rain.
What qualities would characterise a regenerative economy?
Still, technologies are not inherently regenerative; they must be part of broader systems change. As one of the largest foods businesses in the world, Unilever depends on crops to grow the ingredients used in our products. Regenerative agriculture is an important investment area for our Nutrition business as Unilever works towards its net zero target. It will help to create much-needed resilience in the agricultural value chain, help to address global warming and support farmer livelihoods in the long run.
How does regenerative farming help restore nature?
For instance, the protection of common goods such as fish stocks in the high sea is difficult to achieve despite the existence of international regulation applying to many jurisdictions (e.g., Sections 86 and 87 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982). However, the effective governance of such common resources is left to a few powerful nations that have little incentive to collaborate other than for strategic or extractive economic purposes. Instead, local initiatives that acknowledge this dilemma and work to ensure they do not overexploit a resource without replenishing it in an accordant ratio could provide inspiration. For example, the Indiana University Bloomington Campus Tree Care Plan25 provides a simple but efficient rule that if one tree gets cut down for development purposes, they must plant three trees. But the truth is,regenerative practices are not going to make a positive dent in the food systemlong term unless there is a true economic case for farmers and others in thevalue chain.
Early uses of ReFi include designing novel ways to fund public goods (like open source software) and tokenizing environmental assets (like carbon credits) so they could be used in DeFi applications (like DEXes). Decentralized exchanges (DEXes) let users trade cryptocurrencies without the need for intermediaries. Instead of matching buy and sell orders, often DEXes enable exchanges with «liquidity pools».
Government incentives must be carefully crafted to reward genuine environmental improvements without creating perverse incentives. For example, taking productive land out of the food system may increase reliance on imports produced to lower standards and a greater carbon footprint. The issue arises not from the existence of these emissions but from the sheer scale of modern cattle farming, which has far outstripped natural cycles. He is an accomplished transformative leader of geographically diverse teams with 21 years of industry experience. Etkind spent the first 4 years of his career with Schlumberger Integrated Project Management in subsurface and wells project roles, and the last 17 years at Shell in reservoir engineering, wells, planning, decommissioning, and NG R&D global leadership roles.
Several new companies are leveraging lidar, satellite imagery, and drones to achieve MRV at lightning speeds and lower cost; Perennial Earth is one company that is scaling up MRV for carbon soils. By placing a price on carbon, the Protocol presented a unique environmental commodity on an international scale. The concept of a carbon market was unveiled in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol as a mechanism to incentivize carbon-emission reduction. The industrial economic theory works perfectly when Land, Labor, and Capital are present, but the cycle of prosperity breaks when Land no longer exists.
Ethereum, for example, switched to a Proof-of-Stake mechanism, reducing the energy required for creating ETH by 99.95%. Despite this undoubtedly positive shift, it’s still clear that if Web3 financial systems are going to be sustainable, they’re going to have to be deliberately designed with self-renewing processes in mind and work to help mend the planet. An emerging idea is a digital carbon market, where the voluntary carbon market is replaced using blockchain networks. The idea is to bring more transparency, availability, and even liquidity to the carbon credit market. Users can log into a chosen web app, connect a digital wallet, and deposit crypto onto the platform to use regenerative finance and can choose from a list of supported crypto to borrow against the collateral deposited when the funds are deposited.
However, ReFi opens the door to investment to a much broader range of people through decentralised finance initiatives. Blockchain technology allows each transaction to be recorded transparently, visualising the way that each contribution is being spent, tracking the environmental impact clearly and measurably. This is to shift thinking from the ‘take-make-destroy’ model towards a more holistic worldview and examine the current financial incentives for businesses to engage in ethical commerce. Many organisations, large and small, have started to review and realign their business models towards more sustainable practices. Web3 technologies offer multiple opportunities for exacting change across the world from a financial perspective. These include decentralisation and the democratisation of financial services, removing geographic barriers, improving accessibility, and enabling community management of financial systems.
Doughnut economics, post-growth and degrowth are alternatives to mainstream conceptions of economic growth that offer valuable insights. And I think that’s part of holding that balance, as people wake up to the negative side effects of overly reductionist-focused world. The only way that we seem to be able to value them is to bring in financial economy. As awareness and understanding of the polycrisis grow, and regulatory pressure increases, actors from across the financial sector are beginning to direct financial capital towards supporting biocultural regeneration.
And we’d have healthier food, and healthier people, and sequestering carbon, and less floods. It would transform that entire region, which would intransform the politics of the United States, which is one of the biggest problems of our world right now. The paper’s on our website, on the landing page, called Regenerative Capitalism, How Universal Patterns and Principles Will Shape the New Economy. And this is very different than just the circular economy, which of course it’s important to efficiently use our scarce resources. This is circulation meaning healthy inputs into the system, robust circulation into all parts of the system from the top to the bottom, and then an ability to emit our wastes in a way that don’t pollute our nest. I partially used the word for the reason you just mentioned, and partially, if I were to be more accurate, I would have called it multi-capitals-ism, but that, obviously, is a mouthful.
Moreover, these manual measurements are often used as the basis for a linear extrapolation of carbon stock under the assumption that the rest of the forest will be similar to the measured area. This approach is scientifically questionable and leads to distrust in forest financing (Reiersen et al., 2022). Here, a combination of deep learning and remote sensing can greatly increase scalability and accuracy (Ganz et al., 2019; Schiefer et al., 2020; Weinstein et al., 2021; Reiersen et al., 2022). One example of such an approach is the new KacSat methodology, approved by OxCarbon, in which ground-truthing is based on a randomized but stratified sample of the entire forest area based on high-resolution satellite image recognition. The number of measurements taken per stratum is correlated to the prevalence of each stratum in the entire project area.
The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. “Distributed-ledger-based authentication with decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials,” in nd Conference on Blockchain Research and Applications for Innovative Networks and Services, BRAINS, Septembre 28 – 30, 2020, 71–78. “Deploying metadata on blockchain technologies,” in 11th International Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research, MTSR 2017, Tallinn, Estonia, November 28 – December 1, 2017. The authors would like to thank John Clippinger for his invaluable insights into the ReFi space and his constructive feedback on the paper.