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Humans like to categorize, compartmentalize, and construct. Sometimes, the sheer complexity of these constructions blinds us to the radical simplicity required to take action.
The positive impacts we want to achieve can be expressed across three sectors: Natural, Built, and Human. Each succinctly characterizes actions that enhance the likelihood Nature will continue to resemble the fierce benefactor our species has come to know over millennia.
EBF Impact Sectors
Projects that advance the conservation, restoration, and regeneration of species, ecosystems, and natural resources in undisturbed and managed ecosystems
Projects that increase the sustainability and regenerative capacity of manufacturing, the built environment, and technology
Projects that enhance the management and mobilization of people and services to support human and natural communitites
Natural
The mosaic of ecosystems that comprise the natural world not only sustains human existence but also provides models for restoring ecological balance. The Natural Sector encompasses terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments, as well as the intersection between these ecosystems.
The scope of projects in this sector ranges from single species to entire ecosystems and includes wild and minimally disturbed environments as well as managed landscapes and fisheries. Although the goals and methods of these sector levers differ, they share the common goal of using nature as their model and their measure.
EBF impact projects in this sector embrace the efficiencies and benefits of natural ecosystem structure and function. These projects recognize nature’s pace and patient returns, both in undisturbed and intensively managed ecosystems.
Built
Our capacity to transform natural resources into energy, products, and systems has brought us to the brink of environmental collapse. Fossil fuels have accelerated human capacity to quickly turn raw materials into refined products for the Built Sector. They also transformed the nature of work, with a barrel of oil providing the equivalent of 4-5 years of one person’s potential labor. This magnified capacity to transform the environment has fueled more than a century of exponential expansion in industry, infrastructure, and consumption.
The Built Sector represents the transformation of raw materials–whether grown, mined, or extracted–into products that support our daily lives. Housing, transportation, energy systems, manufacturing, public utilities, and manufactured and processed goods all comprise this sector.
EBF impact projects in this sector fall into three categories that follow a progression from meeting essential needs to enhancing health and well-being to ensuring agency in creating a better human environment.
Human
What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. The Human Sector is focused on bettering the human environment through initiatives that provide for basic human needs, enhance quality of life for all, and ensure agency for individuals and communities.
This sector emphasizes human health and wellbeing as core considerations for most environmental remediation projects. This sector also advances socioeconomic solutions for individuals and communities on the frontlines of climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental threats. Initiatives in this sector bridge the expanse between human survival and resilience.
Many challenges addressed in the Human Sector are rooted in the outcomes of extractive economies and climate change. Extractive economies create both environmental and human costs, and neither the costs nor the rewards have been distributed equitably among the global population. Growing inequities are also appearing with alarming frequency and intensity in communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. These inequities create challenges in food security, health and wellbeing, and community empowerment, requiring concerted actions and substantive outcomes.
EBF impact projects in this sector fall into three categories that follow a progression from meeting essential needs to enhancing health and well-being to ensuring agency in creating a better human environment.
About
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Lexicon of Impacts is based on the Ecological Benefits Framework (EBF). This new paradigm provides a foundational architecture to radically transform global carbon, biodiversity, and ecological benefits markets. Coordinating financial institutions, UN agencies, NGOs, companies, and catalytic capital will bring attention to—and help create—a shared pathway for accelerated solutions, providing economic support for the people and projects that need it most.
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