Terraso: Building a Sustainable Future
Tech Matters is the technology partner in an ambitious global collaboration called 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People. We want to help communities plan and finance sustainable economies. The Terraso platform will provide the data and software tools needed to plan, finance, and track their progress.
Social Problem Addressed
Nature’s wake-up call to humanity could not be any louder amid multiple intersecting crises—food insecurity, degrading forests and agricultural lands, growing water scarcity, accelerating loss of biodiversity, destructive impacts from climate change, deepening poverty and inequality, and now a global pandemic. Local leaders struggle with the lack of tools, data, training, and funding they need to create informed solutions for their landscape management efforts in the face of immense climate change.
Here's What We're Doing
Tech Matters believes a tremendous opportunity exists to fill this critical gap and create technology that will help community leaders come together to make better decisions and find funding that will shape the place they live for coming decades. Our team talked to local landscape leaders around the world to gain critical insights on what is, and, more often, what isn’t working for them. Based on these insights, Tech Matters designed, prototyped, and is now actively developing Terraso: an open source, software-as-a-service platform to unite existing tools and help local land management leaders and multi-stakeholder partnerships.
Right now, we’re partnered with a dozen local leadership teams on every major continent to test each new Terraso software release. We expect to extend Terraso to new users as we add capabilities. If you are a potential Terraso user, or someone who funds efforts at the local level, please get in touch with us at info@terraso.org or by signing up for Terraso updates.
Partners and Supporters
The 1000 Landscapes project is a “radical collaboration” among seven social change organizations including Tech Matters. The other core partners include: Rainforest Alliance, Conservation International, UNDP, the Landscape Finance Lab (formerly at WWF), Commonland, and EcoAgriculture Partners, the initiative’s convener. Major funders for the Terraso platform include Schmidt Futures, the IKEA Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and the Cisco Foundation. Startup funding for Tech Matters’ initial work on the 1000 Landscapes project was provided by the Hitz Foundation.
Related Blog Posts
Terraso in The Galapagos
At the end of April 2022, Tech Matters’ Terraso program team headed to the Galapagos to join our six international partner organizations
Landscape Spotlight: Reforestamos México
We’re always learning from our 1000 Landscapes co-design partners. We’ve been working with Reforestamos Mexico since late 2020 to learn about what they really need for accurate monitoring of what is happening on the ground.
Terraso: working on the climate crisis
We are very proud to be working on the climate crisis in partnership with 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People, a coalition of major environmental NGOs and UNDP.