Purpose
Common Earth Alliance convenes diverse working groups tackling topics such as regenerative finance in the area of climate change, bioregional projects, national-scale regeneration, and more. These working groups build connective tissue between areas of practice, theory and science, and policy.
Common Earth Alliance is united by Charter and self-governed across at least three levels: a core team, field teams/working groups, and task teams. The following shared purpose statement has been agreed upon by the Alliance’s founding members.
Common Earth Alliance aims to:
Foster actions that prove out the viability of regenerative development as a powerful addition to existing climate change strategies
In a way that leverages and develops the shared strengths, direction, and leadership potential of Commonwealth communities
So that a unity of effort can be coalesced toward the regeneration of Earth’s oceans, landscapes, and cultures.
Common Earth Alliance members support a living set of first principles. These are articulated in the Common Earth Alliance Charter
The Common Earth Alliance Charter was drafted by the founding members and has been signed by over 30 organizations. The Charter remains in the form of a living document where the community can comment, make suggestions, and endorse at any time. Please be in touch if you would like to become a member.
Common Earth Alliance Working Groups
Regenerative Finance Working Group
From the outset of Common Earth’s efforts it has been clear that there is an urgent need to shift investment away from economic activities that destroy Earth’s commons and toward regenerative work.
The other key barrier is the inadequacy of existing financial models and instruments to the task of investing in ways that will regenerate complex living systems. This is the restraint that the Regenerative Finance Working Group is being formed to address.
Roadmapping National-Scale Regeneration Working Group
Since the beginning of the Common Earth initiative, the Secretariat of the Commonwealth has had a strong interest in providing Commonwealth member nations with a process for creating regenerative road maps for their countries. This offers an unprecedented opportunity to work at national levels to create regenerative policy in support of the diverse and growing efforts to transform human relationships with our planet.
Project Resourcing Working Group
By choosing to adopt a regenerative framework, Common Earth seeks to differentiate itself from other sustainability and climate response efforts. These have tended to favor generic best practices, replicable solutions, and scalability. This approach often ignores and even undermines the qualitative differences to be found in different places, cultures, and ecosystems.
A foundational premise of this working group is that inherent to every place is its own, distinctive character and potential for contribution to the world, and that every project we invest in will be committed to nurturing and expressing this character and potential.
Good Governance Working Group
Governance is about the respect for, and application of, the rule of law, without which the institutions of government and the fair distribution of a nation’s resources cannot function - at any level and with regards to any resource (human, natural, financial).
The Common Earth Governance Working Group has already delivered to the Commonwealth Secretariat a detailed toolkit for all Commonwealth nations to use at governmental and agency levels in-country to assist in the assessment of bids and contracts for the nations fair exploitation of its natural resources from the perspectives of anti-corruption, transparency, ESG and related best practice benchmarks.
It has also joined forces with the Secretariat to design legal and governance-related responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the areas of corporate law and regulatory legislation.