Terminology
Words the field uses, and the ones we coin.
Framework from the ecological design firm Biohabitats for asking, before a data center is designed, whether it belongs in a landscape at all, and how it relates to the watershed, habitat and community around it.
The idea that a bioregion should be organised around the relationships that sustain life in a place, such as a shared water system, rather than around a boundary drawn on a map; argued by Indy Johar and related to the rights-of-nature movement for rivers.
The aim of predictive models of land, water, law and policy that ordinary people can run, question and argue with, rather than tools reserved for planners, companies and agencies.
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A computational representation of a real object, place or system, linked to information about its real-world counterpart.
A proposal for a foundation model trained on observations of the Earth itself, estimating the planet's current state and simulating how it responds to intervention.
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Blue Green Future's accounting framework that counts living ecosystems as productive infrastructure in GDP and on sovereign balance sheets.
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A biodiversity-credit protocol from Ecosystem Regeneration Associates (ERA) in Brazil that pays landholders for keeping an umbrella species and its habitat in good condition, checked by monitoring and external audit.
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African Parks' unit of conservation performance, one square kilometre in which ecological integrity has been kept or improved over a year, used as the basis for outcomes-based funding.
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A proposed social-science counterpart to Earth System Science, set out in The Anthropocene Crisis (Cambridge University Press), edited by Mathias Albert and Barry Buzan.