Image © Robert Szucs.
Bioregional Resilience & Regeneration
During the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller developed the World Game as a comprehensive peacemaking response to the war games of the time using the best available data analysis, systems modeling, scenario building, computer technology, and information design of its day. In the 2020s, every region in the world needs the best possible decision support to find regenerative pathways for land-use, built environment, infrastructure, energy generation, and economic development in the face of increasing climate, biodiversity, water, food, economic, and other disruptions. In the spirit of the World Game, and in cooperation with the BFI Design Lab initiatives below, our goal is to invest in this shared capacity in a lean and agile way, co-design with diverse bioregions and local stakeholders from the beginning, and make an integrated set of data, tools, and processes rapidly and broadly available.
This will enable bioregions to unleash both local and external investment – using new types of nature-aligned models – at the pace and scale required to avoid collapse and rapidly jump to new levels of coherence, health, and resilience. In turn, a response to the polycrisis that is federated across hundreds of networked, spontaneously cooperating bioregions will scale up to the required planetary impact with greater opportunities for constant, locally-attuned course corrections in the face of ongoing disruptions during the rest of the century.
Bioregional Scenarios Project
BFI is co-leading an initiative with exceptional non-profit and for-profit partners to develop rapid scenario building tools that can work across scales from watersheds to bioregions to the biosphere. This capacity includes four key work streams:
- Geospatial knowledge systems;
- Comprehensive regenerative solution inventories;
- Visualization, simulation, and scenario building; and
- Aligned non-extractive bioregional investment platforms
Digital Gaia
Digital Gaia is applying a new kind of biologically inspired AI called active inference developed by globally recognized neurophysiologist Karl Friston. The company is committed to sharing the core technology kernel of active inference in the commons so that it can be applied transparently for regenerative purposes. Their initial use case is to enhance yields, soil health, carbon sequestration, and climate resilience for smallholder farmers using shared agroecological models. Active inference has broad applicability to support bioregional resilience and regeneration.
Bioregional Digital Twin
The Bioregional Digital Twin project is driven by the Collaborative for Bioregional Action Learning & Transformation (COBALT) and the UK-based geospatial visualization company Zedaxis Group. Starting with the Gulf of Maine and the River Tay watershed in Scotland, the project is creating new immersive visualizations – bioregional “digital twins” that can support community-driven transformative planning and action.
Bioregional Funds: Resourcing the Transition to Local Living Economies
Finance for Gaia and Dark Matter Labs are co-leading the Bioregional Funds initiative with the audacious goal to re-envision the global financial architecture so that it may be in the service of life. The BFI Design Lab is pleased to be supporting the Bioregional Funds open innovation ecosystem, with additional financial support and engagement from Biome Trust and One Earth. This workstream includes a forthcoming white paper on bioregional financing facilities that will make the argument for the decentralization of financial resource governance so that financial capital may more effectively reach the people on the ground best positioned to contribute to global regeneration. It makes the case for the urgent development and piloting of a new structure to support this decentralization – a bioregional financing facility – which every bioregion on Earth could create to support its transition to a local living economy.
The financing facility would enable participatory resource allocation in alignment with local resilience and regeneration objectives. The facility would raise an integrated capital portfolio which it would then invest across an aggregated portfolio of projects. In addition to financial resources from government, philanthropists, investors, and crowdfunding, a bioregional financing facility could also issue a local currency or nature-based currency and support the development of eco-credits – including through leveraging Web3 technology.
Publication of the paper will be accompanied by the launch of a community of practice focused on bioregional financing facilities.
Large-Scale Ecological Restoration
BFI is co-leading this effort with John D. Liu of Ecosystem Restoration Communities. Working with local communities undertaking restoration efforts, this project is generating methods for rapid regional scenario building that can provide decision support, build shared vision, and drive investment. The effort is focusing on soil, water cycle, and biodiversity restoration to enhance regional livelihoods and climate resilience. Potential nodal areas include the Turkey earthquake recovery zone, drylands agriculture in Somalia, Kentucky coalfield recovery, and the Weather Maker’s Bardawil and Sinai project in northern Egypt.