The regenerative economy

There’s a neat youtube channel called Mossy Earth, which undertakes projects to restore various ecosystems around the world. Subscribers to the channel can pay to help offer to make these restoration efforts possible. They get an enjoyment out of then seeing the money help to go towards helping nature, and also to view a well made video. This is an example of a regenerative economy. Money goes towards restoring nature.

One of the ways to think about the regenerative economy ( see this article of mine about the difference between extractive, sustainable and regenerative economy) is in terms of ecosystem services. A moneyed economy is made of services that people pay for. Nature presents services to us. People may thus pay to restore nature to get those services.

Take for instance health. It’s been documented that being around nature, people become healthier, with measurable biological change in their bodies. So one way to build the regenerative economy is to sell health benefits.

Or let’s take fire, drought, and flood insurance. These natural disasters can be mitigated by restoring nature, by having healthier soils that absorb more water, by having trees that can slow the stormwaters when there is a lot of rain. The same trees may also help create rain in the dry season when there is a need for more water. This flood insurance idea is presented by Tim Coates who came on the “Investing in Regenerating Agriculture and Food” podcast. He said to sell flood insurance to key institutional players, and then use that money to restore soil, trees and nature.

What is needed is to raise awareness about the solution and it’s workability first. Then it becomes easier to sell the insurance. Business is well of this general issue of how to sell a product to people that are not aware of its benefits yet. They will often invest big efforts and money for a couple of years to create a new segment of the market through lots of advertising and education.

So we can do the same for these fire, drought, and flood natural solutions. Invest effort and outreach to bring awareness. Once that awareness hits a tipping point, the sales becomes much easier.

One can also start off in niche spaces, where the market is already more primed for such efforts. So certain towns, and neighborhoods might be much more amenable to such natural disaster insurance methods. Start with those towns first.

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The Restoring Water Cycles and Climate workshop by Alpha Lo will be Jul 7th Sun noon-2pm est. Unfortunately Nick Steiner won’t be able to make the workshop. Use this link to get on call.

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