Across the UK and globally, regions face accelerating ecological, social, and economic pressures. These include biodiversity loss, cultural erosion, social fragmentation, and climate disruption—all unfolding within complex, interdependent landscapes. In such contexts, high-quality decision-making for regeneration and resilience must be deeply informed by place-specific knowledge.

Yet most existing data systems are fragmented, overly technical, or disconnected from lived experience. They often fail to reflect the interconnected realities of place—ecological, cultural, social, and economic—and lack mechanisms for shared meaning-making and governance. There is a pressing need for situated, multi-dimensional intelligence infrastructures that can sense, understand, and support bioregional health in its full complexity.

The Bioregional Observatory (BO) emerges to meet this need. It acts as the intelligence, observation, and sense-making hub for all the Bioregion’s communities of interest and place and of the Bioregional Financing Facility (BFF), serving as both a trusted source of insight and a commons-based platform for collaboration, learning, and action. The BO supports communities and institutions in recognising and nurturing patterns that promote bioregional vitality over time.

Bioregional Observatories offer a distinct, place-based infrastructure to generate, interpret, and apply knowledge in service of bioregional health and regeneration. Their value lies in enabling long-term, whole-system intelligence, grounded in both rigorous data and lived experience.

You can read more about their core functions as we envision them and also how to get started developing a BO for your own bioregion in the concept note.