Grant / Impact Investment Opportunities

Revised Grant Proposal (12/12/2025)

Developing Planetary Intelligence for a Regenerative Future
Applicant: Center for Regenerative Community Solutions (CRCS) & the Possible Planet Lab
Duration: 18–36 months
Funding Requested: $1.5M–$6M
Project Type: Research, Technology Development, Public Benefit Infrastructure

1. Executive Summary

Humanity faces converging ecological, social, and governance crises. At the same time, artificial intelligence has emerged as a powerful—but ambiguous—tool that could either accelerate these crises or help guide humanity toward a regenerative future.

The Planetary Intelligence for Regenerative Futures (PIRF) initiative will create the world’s first nonprofit research and governance center focused explicitly on developing ecologically aligned, culturally respectful, and ethically grounded planetary intelligence.

This work builds on published scholarship in Indigenous studies, regenerative design, commons governance, and Earth system science. It incorporates established relational principles—reciprocity, responsibility, humility, and respect—into the conceptual and technical architectures guiding AI development.

Our goal is not to create artificial authority or automated decision-makers. Rather, it is to extend human collective intelligence, enabling societies to perceive and respond to what the Earth is telling us: its limits, its thresholds, and its ongoing self-healing processes.

This proposal introduces a framework that ensures:

  • AI development reduces rather than increases ecological harm
  • Indigenous knowledge is respected through relational protocols, not extracted
  • Communities participate meaningfully in governance
  • Earth systems science grounds all technical design
  • Risks of appropriation, overreach, and corporate capture are addressed directly

The PIRF initiative aims to build the capacity for a future in which technological intelligence participates in the preservation and restoration of the living Earth.

2. Background and Rationale

The concept of planetary intelligence, introduced in recent work by Frank, Grinspoon, and Walker, proposes that a mature civilization intentionally maintains planetary habitability.

Today, humanity lacks this capability.
Our information systems are fragmented, reactive, and anthropocentric.

AI—if guided by ecological ethics and relational governance—could help remedy this gap by:

  • synthesizing ecological data at planetary scale,
  • detecting early-warning signals of systemic instability,
  • illuminating long-term consequences of human actions,
  • supporting regenerative planning at local and regional scales, and
  • helping societies coordinate across boundaries and generations.

However, AI currently operates within extractive economic systems, carries substantial ecological costs, and risks amplifying colonial patterns—especially in relation to Indigenous knowledge.

Research from leading Indigenous scholars and land-based practitioners emphasizes that ecological intelligence arises through relationship, responsibility, and reciprocity, not extraction. Similarly, regenerative practitioners have documented how ecosystems organize themselves through nested, place-based feedback loops.

PIRF seeks to integrate these insights into the design of AI architectures, governance frameworks, and public tools for regeneration.

3. Project Objectives

1. Establish a relational framework for planetary intelligence

Ground AI system design in Indigenous-informed principles:

  • interdependence
  • reciprocity
  • respect for place
  • responsibility across generations
  • humility before complexity

2. Develop ecologically aligned AI architectures

AI tools that interpret Earth system signals, support restoration, and amplify community resilience.

3. Create governance models rooted in relational accountability

A multi-layered governance system including:

  • an Indigenous Advisory Circle with veto authority
  • community-participatory oversight
  • scientific and ethical review
  • transparent reporting and auditability

4. Reduce the ecological footprint of AI development

Research and deploy tools and methods that minimize energy, carbon, and water impacts.

5. Pilot prototypes that assist communities and ecosystems

Initial applications in:

  • watershed-scale restoration
  • regenerative financing
  • climate adaptation
  • land-use and biodiversity planning
  • local and bioregional dashboards

6. Build the Planetary Intelligence Commons Platform

A publicly accessible environment sharing data, research, educational content, and open-source tools.

4. Indigenous Knowledge Protocols & Relational Governance

This initiative embraces the principle that Indigenous knowledge is not data; it is relational, place-based, and carried through lived experience and community practice.

Accordingly, PIRF will implement:

1. Relational Partnership Protocols

  • Engagement occurs through existing relationships or invited introductions.
  • Participation is voluntary, relational, and paced according to community guidance.
  • No direct outreach to knowledge keepers occurs without relational consent.

2. Knowledge Sovereignty & Cultural Protocols

  • Communities determine what knowledge may be digitized, shared, represented, or withheld.
  • Sensitive cultural teachings remain protected.
  • Knowledge remains under community control at all times.

3. Indigenous Advisory Circle

  • Composed of respected knowledge holders, with diverse representation.
  • Holds authority to approve, revise, or reject specific uses of knowledge or technology.
  • Provides ongoing guidance on relational ethics, responsibilities, and community impacts.

These protocols draw on published frameworks in Indigenous research ethics, knowledge governance, and land-based education.

5. Ecological Impacts of AI & Pathways to Reduce Them

AI development today produces substantial environmental harm, including:

  • high electricity use
  • water consumption for cooling
  • energy-intensive training cycles
  • embodied emissions from hardware manufacturing

PIRF will address these impacts directly:

1. Energy & Carbon Reduction Strategies

  • Use renewable-powered data centers
  • Employ energy-efficient model architectures
  • Maximize inference-on-edge and distributed computation

2. Water Conservation Strategies

  • Select low-water data partners
  • Utilize emerging liquid-cooling alternatives
  • Optimize training schedules for cooler seasons or off-peak conditions

3. Long-Term Innovation

  • Support research in neuromorphic systems, analog computation, and low-power chipsets
  • Encourage shared model training to reduce duplication of effort

Planetary intelligence cannot rest on extractive technological foundations. Ecological alignment is central to the initiative.

6. Conceptual Architecture: Relational, Reciprocal, Responsible Intelligence

The PIRF conceptual model integrates insights from Indigenous scholarship, regenerative design, Earth systems science, and multi-agent AI governance.

Key principles include:

1. Interdependence

AI systems must model relationships, not isolated variables.

2. Reciprocity

AI outputs should improve the health of the systems from which they draw knowledge.

3. Responsibility

AI must include self-limiting functions and automatic constraints on harmful activities.

4. Place-Based Awareness

Intelligence emerges through local context, not abstraction alone.

5. Generational Time Horizons

Evaluation metrics must incorporate multi-decade and multi-century impacts.

6. Multi-Agent Self-Governance

AI agents monitor and regulate each other, based on commons-like governance rules.

This architecture supports intelligence that listens to the Earth, amplifies regenerative action, and enhances human understanding of ecological patterns.

7. Risk Analysis & Mitigation

Risk 1: Appropriation of Indigenous Knowledge

Mitigation:

  • Indigenous Advisory Circle with veto rights
  • Strong knowledge sovereignty protocols
  • No autonomous ingestion of cultural teachings
  • Relational partnerships, not transactions

Risk 2: Ecological Harm from AI Development

Mitigation:

  • Renewable power, low-impact hardware
  • Efficiency-focused training
  • Environmental impact audits

Risk 3: Corporate Capture or Technological Overreach

Mitigation:

  • Open-source tools
  • Transparent governance
  • Community oversight and scientific review
  • Explicit avoidance of proprietary ownership of knowledge

Risk 4: Misinterpretation of Earth Data

Mitigation:

  • Collaborations with Earth system scientists
  • Cross-validation with ecological field data
  • Human-in-the-loop evaluation

Risk 5: Overreliance on AI

Mitigation:

  • Emphasize AI as support, not authority
  • Protect human decision-making and community autonomy

8. Project Activities & Work Plan

Phase 1 (Months 1–6): Foundations

  • Establish governance structures
  • Develop ethical frameworks
  • Conduct ecological footprint assessment
  • Convene Indigenous Advisory Circle
  • Lab architecture and literature synthesis

Phase 2 (Months 7–18): Prototyping

  • Build initial tools: watershed regeneration models, community dashboards, regenerative finance assistants
  • Evaluate with communities and scientists
  • Optimize ecological efficiency

Phase 3 (Months 19–36): Public Infrastructure

  • Launch Planetary Intelligence Commons Platform
  • Host public dialogues and educational events
  • Publish research and open-source tools
  • Expand bioregional pilot sites

9. Expected Outcomes

  • A relational model of planetary intelligence rooted in ecological ethics
  • Multi-agent governance protocols based on commons principles
  • Practical AI prototypes that support regenerative action
  • Reduced ecological footprint of AI operations
  • Public platform enabling accessible, open-source planetary intelligence
  • Strengthened capacity for communities to interpret and respond to ecological change
  • Scholarly contributions drawing on Indigenous-informed frameworks and regenerative science

10. Governance

PIRF governance is multi-layered and transparent:

1. Indigenous Advisory Circle

  • Holds final authority over culturally sensitive domains
  • Approves all uses involving Indigenous knowledge
  • Ensures relational integrity

2. Earth Systems & Scientific Council

  • Oversees accuracy, ecological grounding, and scientific validity

3. Ethical Review Board

  • Ensures compliance with principles of non-extraction, reciprocity, and responsibility

4. Community Oversight Forum

  • Enables real-time feedback from participating regions

5. Technical Stewardship Team

  • Implements guardrails, energy optimization, and transparent reporting

11. Significance and Innovation

PIRF is the first initiative to integrate:

  • AI governance
  • Indigenous-informed relational ethics
  • regenerative economics
  • Earth system science
  • participatory design
  • open-source planetary intelligence

It advances the possibility of intelligence—human and machine—aligned with the healing capacities of the Earth.

12. Conclusion

AI today sits at a crossroads. It can amplify extraction, accelerate ecological harm, and deepen inequity—or it can help humanity perceive what the Earth is telling us, understand the consequences of our actions, and participate more consciously in the planet’s long-term health.

The Planetary Intelligence for Regenerative Futures initiative is a commitment to the latter path.

Our goal is simple yet profound:
to extend human intelligence in service of life, using the best tools available while honoring the oldest and deepest forms of wisdom.

Version 1 (12/10/2025)

1. Funding the Development of Planetary Intelligence

Project Title: Developing Planetary Intelligence for a Regenerative Future
Applicant: Center for Regenerative Community Solutions (CRCS) & Possible Planet Lab
Project Duration: 18–36 months
Funding Requested: $1.5M–$6M (scalable based on scope)
Project Type: Research, Technology Development, Public Benefit Infrastructure
Keywords: planetary intelligence, AI governance, regenerative design, multi-agent systems, Ostrom, ecological modeling, collective intelligence

Executive Summary

Humanity faces an unprecedented convergence of ecological overshoot, climate destabilization, biodiversity collapse, economic fragility, and institutional erosion. At the same time, we now possess a transformative technological capability—artificial intelligence—that can accelerate scientific discovery, support regenerative design, improve governance, and elevate collective intelligence.

But today’s AI systems are not yet aligned with planetary stewardship. They are optimized for productivity, profit, and personalization—not for sustaining a habitable Earth.

The Planetary Intelligence for Regenerative Futures (PIRF) initiative will establish the world’s first nonprofit AI research and governance center dedicated to:

  1. Developing AI foundations that serve planetary health and human flourishing

  2. Designing multi-agent self-governance frameworks based on Elinor Ostrom’s commons principles

  3. Building an open, ecological “Planetary Intelligence Architecture”

  4. Creating applied prototypes for climate adaptation, regenerative finance, community resilience, and ecological restoration

  5. Launching a public-facing commons platform to support global collaboration

This project fills a critical gap: a coordinated, interdisciplinary framework for ensuring that AI evolves as a life-supporting system, not a life-undermining one.

Background and Rationale

Recent work by astrophysicists Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker proposes that habitable planets likely pass through phases culminating in planetary intelligence—the ability of a civilization to intentionally maintain conditions that support life.

Earth has not yet achieved this state.

Today’s AI systems represent early protoforms of such intelligence, but they lack:

  • continuous real-world learning loops,

  • ecological grounding,

  • normative principles for governance,

  • coordination across models or institutions,

  • transparency and accountability,

  • integration with regenerative economic and social systems.

Moreover, present AI governance debates are bottlenecked by polarized positions:
catastrophe-only narratives on one side, techno-solutionism on the other.

Missing is a third path: AI as a planetary commons, co-governed by humans and grounded in life-supporting principles.

CRCS and Possible Planet Lab are uniquely positioned to lead this work, drawing on decades of experience in:

  • regenerative finance (e.g., C-PACE leadership),

  • bioregional design,

  • ecological restoration,

  • climate resilience,

  • public engagement,

  • systems thinking,

  • cross-disciplinary partnerships (Panama, Great Lakes, New Jersey, Design School for Regenerating Earth, EcoRestoration Alliance).

This proposal positions the lab as a global research and governance hub for the next era of AI.

Project Objectives

  1. Define a rigorous conceptual and operational framework for Planetary Intelligence.
    Integrate ecological modeling, AI systems design, Earth system science, and commons theory.

  2. Develop multi-agent AI self-governance mechanisms.
    Use Ostrom’s principles to create interoperable protocols for:

    • cooperation

    • conflict resolution

    • boundary-setting

    • monitoring & feedback loops

    • consensus formation

    • ethical constraints

  3. Create prototype “AI stewards” for ecological and community well-being.
    Applied systems for:

    • watershed-scale regeneration

    • resilience planning

    • early-warning ecological risk detection

    • regenerative finance (e.g., C-PACE optimization, community capital stacks)

    • carbon drawdown forecasting

    • community design and bioregional learning systems

  4. Build the Planetary Intelligence Commons Platform.
    Public tools, open research, educational materials, and participatory engagement.

  5. Launch a global collaboration network.
    Universities, nonprofits, Indigenous partners, AI researchers, regenerative practitioners.

Project Activities & Work Plan

Phase 1 (Months 1–6): Foundations & Architecture

  • Literature synthesis across AI governance, astrobiology, complexity science, regenerative design

  • Framework for planetary intelligence & AI wisdom

  • Technical plan for multi-agent governance

  • Convening of advisors and partners

  • Core research fellowships

Phase 2 (Months 7–18): Prototyping & Experimentation

  • Develop early prototype agents for ecological modeling, scenario planning, and commons governance

  • Pilot testbed in two bioregions (e.g., Great Lakes Basin, Panama)

  • Iterative evaluation using transparent benchmarks and safety guardrails

  • Produce working papers, datasets, open-source modules

Phase 3 (Months 19–36): Deployment & Public Infrastructure

  • Launch the Planetary Intelligence Commons Platform

  • Produce policy briefs, public tools, AI integrity frameworks, and educational content

  • Build multi-stakeholder governance model

  • Host annual “Planetary Intelligence Summit”

Expected Outcomes

  1. A clear, research-backed definition of Planetary Intelligence as a field

  2. Governance-ready multi-agent AI frameworks grounded in commons principles

  3. AI prototypes for ecological regeneration and community resilience

  4. Open-source tools for nonprofits, communities, educators, and researchers

  5. Public engagement infrastructure to democratize access to planetary intelligence

  6. Policy recommendations for governments, philanthropies, and AI labs

  7. Peer-reviewed publications and high-impact thought leadership

  8. A global network connecting planetary stewards, technologists, scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and civil society

Significance and Innovation

This proposal is the first to explicitly unify:

  • AI safety and planetary boundaries

  • Multi-agent governance and Ostrom’s commons theory

  • Ecological restoration and reinforcement learning from Earth systems

  • Public participation and open science

  • Regenerative economics and climate resilience planning

It represents a shift from narrow AI optimization toward an intelligence capable of sustaining life on Earth.

Organizational Capacity

CRCS and Possible Planet bring:

  • a 12-year track record in climate finance and regenerative community solutions

  • leadership in designing statewide C-PACE programs

  • deep partnerships with ecological restoration networks

  • established research platforms (Possible Planet book, AI Lab Roadmap, bioregional mapping initiatives)

  • cross-disciplinary experience key to this work

The project will draw on an advisory network including:

  • leading AI researchers

  • Earth system scientists

  • Indigenous leaders

  • complexity science experts

  • regenerative economists

  • commons governance scholars

Budget (summary version)

A full budget can be prepared on request. High-level categories include:

  1. Research fellowships and staff

  2. Technical development (multi-agent systems, ecological modeling)

  3. Data acquisition & cloud compute

  4. Indigenous partnerships & bioregional pilots

  5. Convenings and global summits

  6. Publication and open-platform development

  7. Evaluation and governance work

  8. Administrative overhead

Budget range: $1.5M–$6M, depending on funder and scope.

Evaluation & Impact Assessment

Evaluation integrates:

  • technical performance metrics

  • regenerative impact metrics

  • commons governance adherence

  • community and partner feedback

  • independent external review

  • open science reproducibility standards

  • ecological and bioregional indicators

Impact is measured in:

  • knowledge generation

  • prototype functionality

  • adoption by nonprofits and local governments

  • improvement in decision-making for regenerative projects

  • contributions to global AI governance discourse

Dissemination

Outputs will be shared through:

  • open-access repositories

  • peer-reviewed articles

  • public platform tools

  • conferences, workshops, and webinars

  • policy briefs for governments and foundations

  • TED-style talks and podcasts

  • collaboration with educational institutions

Potential Funders

For inquiries, please contact us.