Case Study: Regen Network
Location: USA-based, global operations including Australia
Investment type: Philanthropic and investment capital
A US-based start-up, Regen Network has two fundamental parts:
- An incorporated global company that is building a global marketplace for ecosystem assets, services and data on a public, ‘proof of stake' (a cryptocurrency consensus mechanism) blockchain ledger.
- The Regen Network community that is developing an open-source toolkit to ‘enable the alignment of ecology with economy’, bringing together farmers, scientists and credit developers to form consensus around the measurement of ecological states and tools to allow ecological value to be bought and sold.
They are working to address some of the challenges facing the nature-based solutions market space, including:
- The top-down design, development and creation of market-based tools without deep community engagement or ownership.
- The tendency for the market to favour and prefer scale and thereby corporate actors over the vast population of smallholder farmers delivering significant ecological and social value.
- The lack of transparency in current market mechanisms around who is buying what and for what offset purposes and the impacts on where the credits are being purchased from.
Let’s unpack a concrete example that helped us get our heads around it. Regen Network is working in partnership with Terra Genesis, Eco Cacao and a cooperative of 120 farmers in Ecuador, one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet, to develop regenerative cacao production systems and measurement tools to feed into a Regenerative Outcome Verification model developed by Terra Genesis International.
This approach enables local communities to design and sell their own eco-credits. Yakum, an NGO focused on food sovereignty, is using the process to work with the Siekopai peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon to ‘develop an eco credit class for their own cultural and ecological context’.
In the words of the Regen team: “This is an important alternative to imposing standardised approaches that are created without local stakeholder input” (2022).
This is one example of how the Network is working towards what they term 'a progressive decentralisation of the nature-based solutions marketplace'. They aim to shift decision-making from structures that are currently quite centralised to community-governed systems that give smallholder and First Nations communities power and agency to design and develop credit mechanisms that align with their cultural and ecological values.
This case study is an extract from Regenerating Investment in Food and Farming: A Roadmap.