Bioregional Financing Facilities derive their ultimate mandate from and find their core purpose in strengthening Bioregional Health. But what is Bioregional Health? And how do we know it is strengthened?

Yes, fundamentally, Bioregional Health Metrics need to be defined by the people who live in place. They should be context-specific and attuned to the peculiarities of a given bioregion. The Cornerstone Indicators framework, developed by our colleagues Emily Harris and Vlad Afanasiev at Dark Matter Labs, is one tool that can help with this.

And yet, we wonder whether there is a skeletal structure that helps us understand what Bioregional Health is generally composed of, conceptually at least. A scaffolding that local communities can develop their bespoke metrics around.

The draft below captures some first thoughts, but I’m keen to improve it through crowd intelligence and collective wisdom.

The breakdown of Structural Integrity – Compositional Integrity – Functional Integrity is adapted from Landbanking Group’s ‘Ecosystem Integrity Index‘. Unfortunately, the EII very much focuses on non-human, natural ecosystems. A Bioregional Health Framework, in my mind, must integrate human and non-human ecosystem health.

🔎 Long story short: Let’s make this better together! Keen to hear thoughts on what is missing here and how it might become actionable across different bioregions. Let us know!