What are the most significant limiting factors to grow regenerative projects and communities? How can we overcome them?
Inhabit is in the process of attending these questions to structure the value proposition of the Inhabit token ecosystem.
Along our journey so far, we encountered 3 primary limiting factors.
ONE: Resource and value allocation
Highly innovative people lack access to land, resources and know-how to successfully develop regenerative projects and communities; they also often lack a fair access to markets that can value the multi-returns that their products generate for society and the earth as a whole.
Access to Land
Price of land has drastically increase because of scarcity, which is driven by land degradation (38% of global cropland), demographic growth and because farmland is a finite and diminishing resource, we don’t make it anymore!
As a result of the global financial crisis and tensions on global food markets an increasing number of governments, large agrobusinesses and private investors are considering farmland as a priority investment[1], this is driving the price of land up even further.
The key consequence: worldwide cost of land has increased at a pace that exceeds the saving that farmers can make by farming their lands, effectively excluding the possibility of farmers to acquire land.
Divergent data shows how many farmers legally own land, yet worldwide most farmers access land through tenancy or chiefdom agreements, and increasingly are no longer direct land-owners. Conflicts both tribal and national, and the culture that emerged in countries that suffered historical geo-political instability, has further prevented farmers to acquire lands and invest in long-term regenerative practices.
In fact, the lack of land security (or some sort of land sovereignty) is one of the strongest deterrents for farmers to invest in natural capital regeneration such as planting trees and growing soils. A commitment of this kind requires a long-term vision, which in turn requires a certain degree of sovereignty over the natural asset.
Land access is an issue both in the Global South and North no matter the size of the farm, and even more of a problem for small-scale farmers. These are generally farms managed by family/individuals/communities rather than businesses, they have a low profit margin and produce a mix of subsistence and localized commercial agriculture. It is paramount to investigate and consider the cultural-food production models of small-scale farmers and indigenous people, because the future of food is hold by them. (Click to read why small-holders are the future of food)
How do we promote land acquisition or other forms of land sovereignty by farmers and indigenous people?
How markets need to shape in a way that recognises and incentivises the growth of small-scale or micro-farming models?
Access to resources and know-how
Getting access to resources for regenerative agriculture is still very problematic, investment funds and credit institutes tend to sponsor intensive productions with quicker returns rather than small-scale agro-ecological productions. This results in a stronger drive for monocultures, intensive agriculture, and an appreciation of land according to criteria suitable for intensive land management (which include flat lands, no perennial vegetation, and more).
There is also a real challenge today to access well-informed and location contingent knowledge on regenerative agriculture. Agroecological knowledge is passed on within the family/community word to mouth, or available through expensive training, sometimes not affordable to everyone.
Today there is an opportunity to see the emergence of a widespread exchange of resources and knowledge between existing actors. However, there is still a great lack of cooperation between the many regenerative projects, that often unknowingly compete for the same resources, and have not yet figure out how to play together at a level that would enable a resource & knowledge source-sink-model to happen at scale.
Access to markets
An apple is not equal to another apple because it has the same price. An apple is just one happening within a process which has involved innumerous relationships of uncountable living agents and energies. Regenerative agro-processes are knowledge-intensive and likely labour-intensive (at least in the start-up phase); they take time, yet generate an uncountable number of positive nature feedbacks: regenerate natural capital and trigger positive human relationships that benefit the larger community as a whole.
Farmers would need to see the birth of markets that recognise and value these additional processes besides the apple if we wish to convince them to invest in this direction; and the economic narrative has a major role to play here.
TWO: The Economic Narrative
Narratives shape cultures, they ultimately change the way reality is perceived and they inform the action and direction of our societies.
Natural capital and ecosystem services are the foundation of our economy and generate $44 trillion of economic value every year. However, they are not taken into account in mainstream economics; this affects how we measure growth, consider and reward value, both as nations and as individuals.
What is value? What is progress?
These are key questions that need to be addressed once we recognize that new economic narratives and models need to emerge for culture to transform into one which stewards, sustains and enhances its life-supporting ecosystems.
THREE: The keystone species
Resources allocation and a reductionistic economic narrative may partly explain the lack of more regenerative projects.
However, deeply at the bottom of the iceberg, the limiting factor that may affect our ability to generate conditions conducive to life and where reciprocity can thrive may be found in our divides from nature and each others.
Humans have emerged as the most impactful keystone specie at planetary level for their driving force in altering ecosystems and climate. As a keystone specie we hold the potential to extinguish our civilisation’s life-supporting systems, as well as an unprecedented power to heal and enhance the ecosystems we depend on.
Otto Scharmer, co-founder of the Presencing Institute, asks a powerful question “Why we collectively create results that nobody wants? What keeps us locked into the old ways of operating?”
Many system thinkers identify the root causes of social-ecological problems to be a human crisis of perception, the perceived dualism that separate mind to body, and the perceived divides that have emerged in most modern human psyche: the social divide (us with others), ecological divide (us with nature) and spiritual divide (us with ourselves).[2]
There is certainly a close relationship between cognition (mean-making) and relationality (the relation humans to humans and humans to more-than-human world). Combined, they are ultimately responsible for the creation of any value, structure, and the whole bio-cultural environment we inhabit. (see relational value article)
Given the immense complexity of these limiting factors, how do we intervene in a way able to shift the limits at the root level (and in a way that is not counterproductive)?
The Inhabit token ecosystem is an initiative that aims to address the limiting factors associated with the access to land/resources, and to launch an action-dialogue about different value systems narratives.
In real terms no one owns land (earth belongs to itself), ownership simply grants certain rights over an asset. Ownership is not problematic on its own, it is the type of relationship that is promoted between an asset stewards that create many different results.
What could then be a legal-relational framework for land ownership and management that produces results that are system and life-enhancer?
INHABIT STEWARDSHIP NFT: A Measure of Stability
A token provides a digital representation of rights over a real-world asset while also reflecting the asset’s value according to a chosen valuation framework.
The INHABIT Stewardship NFT aims to foster the emergence and thriving of stable regenerative ecosystems through their management as a common resource, while establishing a different relationship between people and the land.
The Stewardship NFT is a powerful tool designed to build and sustain the Corridor, a network of interconnected bio-cultural hubs.
By purchasing the NFT, individuals become lifelong stewards of a specific Hub, gaining utility and stewardship rights over designated plots of land, allowing them actively participate in governance decisions that impact these vital ecosystems and many other benefits.
NFT funds are used to acquire degraded lands and turn them into Biodiversity Hotspots. Lands are safeguarded under the innovative INHABIT land tenure framework, a pioneering model of natural reserves which recognises nature as a legal subject of rights, and takes land protection and stewardship to a new level
Land Tenure Framework for Bio-Cultural Hubs
Land acquired through the Inhabit NFT model undergoes a permanent transformation in its legal status and management under the Legal Framework for Bio-Cultural Hubs (BCH). The innovative legal and land tenure framework of INHABIT effectively guarantees and promotes the Rights of Nature (RON), the rights of land stewards, and the rights of other stakeholders involved in protecting and enhancing the bio-cultural value of these lands.
The Framework Allows:
- Permanent Land Protection: The framework ensures that soil use is permanently altered, safeguarding land for conservation. It recognizes land as a subject of rights, affirming nature’s right to exist, persist, and regenerate its vital cycles based on a charter of specific principles.
- Redefined Relationships: It facilitates a transformative relationship between people and land, allocating specific rights to various stakeholders regarding the asset.
- Ownership and Usage Rights: The framework allows for the division and allocation of ownership and usage rights among different actors.
- Monitoring Systems: It includes systems for verifying the maintenance and generation of these rights.
- Empowerment Tools: Legal and economic tools are implemented to empower stakeholders so they can benefit from preserving and regenerating these rights, thus playing a role in maintaining nature’s vital cycles and reconnecting society with nature.
- Physical Corridors of Reserves: Lands are incorporated into a physical corridor of reserves aimed at creating a continuous protected space for the exchange of living knowledge and resources.
- Recognition of Bio-Cultural Heritage: The framework acknowledges and values both existing and emerging bio-cultural heritages.
In the first phase
This tool is used to finance the creation of 10 Bio-Cultural hubs in Colombia, in different bioregions and climates.
The long-term vision
To establish 400 hubs (biodiversity hotspots) across the globe, spaced about 100 km from each other, for a total of 40,000 km long backbone corridor.
Read the INHABIT Land Tenure Framework and become a Steward
When the savings of a community are held into the soil it generates a huge incentive to participate in growing the soil; because the securities and pension of that community are represented by the microorganisms, water, pollination, and all life that is safeguarded in the ecosystem they inhabit.
To know more about Inhabit visit the link www.inhabit.one or write to luca@inhabit.one / dror@inhabit.one