Bioregional Finance

“On arriving in the bioregion in South East Ireland in 2040 one might meet a landscape looking superficially not so different than today’s: rocky shores and sandy coves, green fields and hedges, coastal towns and rural villages, dark forests and upland sheep, and lakes surrounded by heather clad mountains. The difference in 2040 goes deeper than any picture postcard can capture.

In the bioregion of the future, wild salmon are swimming up the rivers, the fields are harboring healthy soils and producing nutritious food for local communities that know their farmers and cherish giving back to nature. The rivers and lakes are pristine, the farms are places of joy and jobs with secure futures, the forests are dappled green oases of native woodlands and the towns and rural communities are hubs generating social and cultural wealth as well as economic stability.

How will this invisible, fundamental transition to the future be funded? Bioregional financing is one way to frame the discussion and implement the diversity of solutions.”

What is Bioregional Finance?

Bioregional Financing refers to a economic approach designed to support different kinds of regenerative projects that align with the ecological, social, and economic and inspirational (4 Returns) characteristics of specific bioregions.

It seeks to shift investments from global, extractive systems toward local, long-term sustainable initiatives that restore ecosystems and promote community well-being. By leveraging localised knowledge and resources, bioregional financing aims to build resilient economies that are in harmony with natural cycles and the unique environmental as well as community needs of each bioregion.

This approach differs from traditional siloed public and private funding by being focused on systemic change, working within an area defined by nature and the relationships of people living there, considering the assets both nature and humans can contribute with within that area, and looking for holistic regenerative returns across all dimensions of social, natural, financial and economic return.

Bioregional Finance in SE Ireland?

Our bioregional work is just one initiative globally that increasingly believes that there must be a better way of providing a ‘platform for change’ that ensures the financial stability for the people leading and engaging with concepts such as the ones presented on this website.

Some of our ongoing activities relating to Bioregional Finance are expanded upon below, and a Bioregional Finance BWL Circle will be formed in late 2024. Please get in touch if you would like to participate in this.

Integrated portfolio development

We have listened, and continue to listen, to the needs and opportunities in the landscape to see if new forms of finance can drive positive change. In Sept 2023, we gathered local changemakers working with 4 Return concepts with Irish and international landsfinance experts at an event called ‘Innovative Landscape and Community Finance’. We can recommend watching the film (52min) capturing much of this event here.

Foundational to our approach of a bioregional finance mechanism for SE Ireland is the idea of whole bioregional investment portfolios, with attached platform of support, as opposed to individual investment objects. The portfolio of concepts is an emerging and dynamic collection of entangled initiatives supported as a whole – no one is independently investable as a stand-alone business in the traditional sense of looking for economic returns. We believe in co-financing for long-term benefits to the common good, sharing risk and sharing the returns be they financial, social, environmental or inspirational.

If you are an investor or funder interested in exploring and learning how this kind of integrated investment vehicle – consisting of a place-based, system-changing support platform and related portfolio of concepts – might work, we invite you to talk more by getting in touch and/or joining our Bioregional Finance Circle.

Seed funding: Catalyst and partnership grants

Through funding provided by Commonland, BWL SE Ireland can provide small catalyst grants to local pioneering changemakers. These are intended to unleash capacity to test a potential social or ecological innovation in a way that would not have been possible to risk doing otherwise. Occasionally we can also provide a follow up small partnership grant.

To date the following Catalyst grants have been provided (more details to come on each of them). The first two have also received subsequent small partnership grants to develop their ideas further.

Dunhill Multi Education Centre (Helen Kavanagh): to map and pilot education offers in regenerative agriculture and other returns.
Donal Sheehan: to test and then develop further a new 4 Return Index for sustainable farming (SFI Index).
Ray McGrath: to pilot ‘Tuesdays at Woodhouse’ as part of the portfolio concept ‘Unleashing the Social Capital of the Third Age’.
Catherine Barron: to explore what form and creative collaboration might take between artists and BWL SE Ireland.
The Copper Coast Geopark (Robbie Galvin): to develop a 4 Returns theory of change for portfolio concept ‘Mission Driven Geopark’.

Piloting a new bioregional finance mechanism?

Thanks to the Robert Bosch Foundation, we are able to explore and hopefully pilot pioneering financial mechanisms that might direct diverse forms of financial capital towards the bioregion in SE Ireland. The BWL portfolio of existing and emerging concepts will have with both tangible outcomes for the 4 Returns, and intangible systems-changing outcomes, all manifesting and aggregated at the bioregional scale, and potentially beyond.

The team currently working on this exploration are Leon Seefeld, Sarah Prosser and Karin Muller with additional input from Thomas Ball. Let us know if you would like to join.

The mechanisms emerging from this work so far, that we would love to keep developing and potentially test include the following, with estimated investment required to test this element of a wider bioregional finance ecosystem in parentheses:

Further resources:

‘Innovative Landscape and Community Finance’ A film (52mins) introducing the SE Irish Bioregion approach to bioregional finance and the people leading the concepts in the emerging portfolio. Watch the film here and read more details of the event we had in Sept 2022 here.

External links:

“Bioregional Financing Facilities – Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet” Read the ebook here