Terraso: Building a Sustainable Future

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 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.

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 launching Terraso: an open source, software-as-a-service platform to unite existing tools and help local land management leaders and multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Tech Matters 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.

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, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 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.