Open Conversations: Finance as a Tool for Regeneration (Monty Bryant)

[music] Finance is one of the most powerful coordination mechanisms [music] that Humanity has ever invented across the globe it drives our decisions activities every day and right [music] now that system is heading hurtling us towards um total ecological and systemic collapse at the same time in all of those challenges that we Face there's also a huge opportunity and new paradigm and that is the the Paradigm of regeneration we need to move towards a regenerative economy otherwise we simply [music] cannot go on that's like physics basically my name's Monty Merlin Bryant I uh do a lot of work in the refi movement I'm one of the founders of [music] REI and I do a lot of work uh with cell public goods I'm one of the Coes there I set on the board of trusted seed [music] and also most recently have helped to kind of source and incubate this regen coordination quite a few different hats but just pass about the the regenerative Finance [music] movement regenerative Finance is an in sort of emergent movement and that [music] is trying to redesign the financial system with all sorts of experiments um how do we Design Systems that are not just [music] sustainable and sustaining the current extractive systems that we have uh and all of the degradation that has already [music] happened uh but actually regenerative uh restoring our resource capacity restoring ecosystems improving our societies our mental health our Consciousness our communities and and sort of moving to that next Paradigm and and instead of seeing Finance as the enemy Finance can be a hugely powerful enabling tool in getting towards that regenerative economy that regenerative uh Vision [music] the concept of of refi or or actually more broadly regenerative Finance is not um a totally New Concept it has kind of a history stemming in the fields of regenerative economics you know how do we Design Systems that are growing and building our resource capacity what is the kind of newer ele of that is that kind of refi acronym um that really has origins in [music] sort of 2021 when about 10% of the world's carbon markets came on chain billions of dollars of volume with toucan and CLA protocol and this kind of refi acronym [music] was born and that's really the intersection of regenerative economics with advanced technology web 3 blockchain AI um [music] to deliver on this regenerative uh potential there's an amazing ecosystem of projects ranging from ecological currencies to digital measurement reporting verification reforestation regenerative agriculture circular economy that are leveraging some of these really Advanced Technologies and using it to support uh the missions and aims of uh inan service to um a regenerative future and then there's this really exciting emergent strand of refi uh that is the Biore Regional movement or bi Regional Finance [music] the actual bio Regional movement is not new we've had the concept of a bio region since the 1960s [music] and the the basic idea is that instead of defining a place by nation state boundaries that are often drawn on Colonial history um instead we're we're defining it uh by the watersheds [music] the ecological boundaries the geological features the cultural and social features of that land H and really defining a boundary uh connected to its actual place and and its uh the nature and the people [music] in that region we need to bring many many more people entrepreneurs resources into this movement to really grow and scale the regenerative economy and keep pushing forward experiments [music] as fast as possible uh because yeah we really uh don't have much time