Gaia AI and Regen Network are thrilled to announce REGEN IRL, a new collaborative grant competition aimed at supercharging grassroots regenerative projects around the world. The program offers an $888 award to the on-the-ground project that delivers the highest Planetary Return on Investment (PROI) – in other words, the maximum positive impact on people and the environment. In a unique twist, the winning project will be selected by Gaia AI’s intelligent agent system (with input from human experts) based on which proposal promises the greatest ecological and social upside. This visionary competition merges cutting-edge AI with community action, reflecting a shared commitment by Gaia AI and Regen Network to “catalyze exponential regeneration” through technology and grassroots innovation.
Open to anyone, REGEN IRL invites farmers, land stewards, community organizations, eco-entrepreneurs – anyone with a high-impact regenerative project – to apply. “In the spirit of Gaia AI’s successful Gaia IRL initiative, the partnership is kicking off a regenerative grants competition to fund real-world projects,” the organizations announced. Examples of eligible projects include:
Agroforestry ventures (e.g., planting food forests or mixed-species farms)
Habitat restoration efforts (such as rewilding landscapes or conserving biodiversity)
Soil carbon pilots (regenerative agriculture improving soil health and carbon sequestration)
Community climate solutions like public gardens, urban tree planting, or waste cleanup initiatives
What sets REGEN IRL apart is the integration of AI in both selection and support. Gaia AI’s “agentic board” – an AI-driven decision agent augmented by expert advisors – will evaluate proposals for their PROI to identify the projects with the greatest potential upside for people and planet. The top project will receive the $888 grant (distributed in $USDC) along with a boost of technological support and access to Gaia AI’s toolkit of AI resources. This means the winner can leverage remote sensing data analysis, AI-generated best practice insights, and an AI reporting assistant to help measure and verify their project’s outcomes.
Importantly, every qualifying applicant will receive a small reward in $REGEN tokens, not just the grand prize winner. This ensures that all credible grassroots innovators get a helpful nudge to continue their work. As Gaia AI highlighted in a recent announcement, the REGEN IRL competition features an $888 USDC prize for the winner. In short, anyone who steps up with a viable regenerative proposal will earn at least a small grant in $REGEN – a token of appreciation for their commitment to healing the planet.
How to Apply: Join the REGEN IRL Competition
Applying is simple. Prospective participants can submit their project proposals via the REGEN IRL portal at https://regen.gaiaai.xyz/irl/. On the portal, applicants will find a brief form to describe their project’s plan, impact goals, and resource needs. Any individual or organization with a regenerative project – big or small – is encouraged to apply. Key steps include:
Visit the REGEN IRL Portal: Go to https://regen.gaiaai.xyz/irl/ and click on the application form.
Describe Your Project: Provide a short outline of your project’s objectives, the community or ecosystem it will benefit, and how you plan to achieve maximum impact. Remember, PROI (Planetary ROI) – tangible benefits to people and planet – is the core selection metric.
Submit Your Proposal: Complete the form with your details and submit it through the portal. If you have any supporting documents or media, you can include them as instructed on the site.
All applications will be reviewed by Gaia AI’s intelligent agent and Regen’s team. The deadline for the first round of the competition is approaching, with the official kickoff slated for September 10th and a winner announcement during NYC Climate Week at the end of the Month. (The program runs in a public, community-engaged manner in line with Regen Network’s open governance ethos, so applicants and the broader community can follow along through updates on the Regen Forum and Commons.)
Don’t wait – if you have a regenerative idea that needs funding and support, submit your proposal now and join this exciting experiment in AI-augmented climate action.
Definition: Planetary Return on Investment (PROI) is Gaia AI’s guiding metric for evaluating regenerative projects based on the maximum ecological and social impact per dollar spent. In contrast to a traditional ROI (financial return), PROI measures how each dollar can drive tangible benefits for the planet and communities. This means prioritizing projects that deliver outsized environmental restoration and social good relative to their cost.
How PROI is Assessed: Gaia AI employs a blend of data-driven analysis and advanced AI modeling to estimate each proposal’s potential PROI. The goal is to forecast real-world outcomes – from carbon sequestered and biodiversity restored to livelihoods improved – in proportion to the funding requested. Gaia’s AI-assisted treasury system helps allocate resources to the highest-impact ideas, using integrated monitoring and verification (MRV) tools to track results and ensure accountability. Direct environmental metrics (e.g. kilograms of waste removed, hectares reforested, tons of CO₂ offset) and other key data from projects are fed back into the systems, allowing Gaia’s algorithms (and its community) to continually learn which interventions yield the greatest regenerative “bang for the buck.” This evidence-based, iterative approach embodies a visionary yet action-driven ethos – using cutting-edge AI insight and on-the-ground data to maximize planetary impact.
PROI Evaluation Criteria: In reviewing grant proposals, Gaia AI and Regen Network look for several high-PROI indicators:
Ecological Impact: The degree to which the project heals or enhances ecosystems – for example, land or ocean restoration, biodiversity gains, pollution cleanup, or climate benefits (measured in clear metrics like area restored or emissions reduced).
Social Impact: Benefits to people and communities, such as job creation, food security, education, or well-being improvements for local populations. A strong PROI project often empowers grassroots communities while advancing environmental goals.
Cost Effectiveness: How efficiently the project converts funding into impact. Projects that demonstrate a large positive outcome for each dollar (e.g. restoring many acres per $1,000, or removing significant waste per $100) rank highly. This ensures resources generate outsized returns for people and planet.
Data & Measurability: A credible plan for tracking and verifying results. Proposals should include how they will monitor progress (using data, sensors, or community reporting) and provide transparent metrics. Measurable outcomes – backed by data – enable Gaia’s AI and the community to validate the impact. (Regen Network’s blockchain-based ecocredit tools may assist here by recording ecological data.)
Community Relevance & Participation: Alignment with local needs and engagement of the community. Projects co-created with or supported by local stakeholders tend to be more sustainable and meaningful on the ground. Gaia favors initiatives that have grassroots buy-in and reflect a bottom-up approach to regeneration, not just top-down theory.
By weighing projects against these PROI criteria, the REGEN IRL grant competition ensures that funding goes to the proposal with the greatest promise of real-world regeneration. It’s a rigorous yet inspiring standard – blending formal evaluation with a visionary purpose. In essence, the winning project will be the one that can turn a modest grant into the maximum possible good for the planet, exemplifying the competition’s core mission of high-impact, regenerative action.
Gaia AI × Regen Network: A Partnership for Planetary Impact
REGEN IRL is the latest fruit of the Gaia AI and Regen Network partnership, a visionary alliance announced earlier this year. This collaboration, dubbed “Regen AI,” unites Regen’s pioneering leadership in ecological finance with Gaia AI’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence and grassroots movement. Regen Network has spent years developing a trusted platform for high-integrity ecological credits – from scientifically rigorous carbon and biodiversity credit methodologies to transparent on-chain registries. Gaia AI, for its part, emerged with a bold mission to “catalyze exponential regeneration” by integrating advanced AI with local wisdom and global coordination. In practice, the Gaia community has been experimenting with “agentic AI” (AI bots acting as community agents) and real-world actions – even funding micro-grants for regenerative projects via earlier Gaia IRL initiatives – to achieve measurable “Planetary Return on Investment”.
This shared ethos forms the backbone of the partnership. Technology alone won’t heal the planet – it takes communities, aligned incentives, and collective intelligence. By joining forces, Gaia AI and Regen Network are creating a “symbiotic feedback loop” between AI and the regenerative movement. Gaia’s advanced AI agents and open knowledge commons serve as a “brain” to augment Regen’s community processes, from project outreach to decision-making. Meanwhile, Regen’s robust on-chain data and active eco-community provide the ground-truth data and human context that keep Gaia’s AI aligned with reality. It’s a partnership of digital agents and grassroots human agents working together toward a thriving planet.
Crucially, the two teams have also aligned around a common currency: the $REGEN token, which is the governance and reward token in Regen’s ecosystem. Both organizations see $REGEN as a connective thread uniting the broader regenerative finance (ReFi) space. By denominating REGEN IRL grants in $REGEN tokens and rewarding all participants with $REGEN, the competition reinforces this token’s role as a shared incentive for climate action. As Regen Network demonstrated with recent community votes, $REGEN is envisioned as a standard for liquidity and governance across many regenerative applications. Gaia AI’s embrace of $REGEN – from using it in grants to potentially creating AI-curated bounties paid in $REGEN – further ties AI-driven funding decisions into Regen’s democratic governance framework. In other words, the same community that governs ecological projects will help steer AI-guided initiatives, ensuring accountability and real-world impact rather than speculative hype.
This partnership’s momentum is already evident. Earlier this year, Gaia AI’s community-backed pilot project restored a stretch of Mexico’s Sian Ka’an UNESCO World Heritage site, removing over 230 kg of plastic waste from beaches in a single day. That “Gaia IRL” activation provided hard data and lessons that fed back into Gaia’s AI models, improving their ability to allocate resources for maximum ecological impact. Now, with REGEN IRL and Regen’s infrastructure, the alliance is poised to replicate and scale such successes. “By integrating with Regen Network’s proven frameworks, the technology remains grounded in tangible impact,” the Gaia AI team noted, and on-chain incentives can drive offline action – now, with Regen IRL grants and AI guidance, we expect many more such actions to flourish and be tracked. In sum, Gaia AI and Regen are blending visionary tech and grassroots energy to accelerate the regenerative finance movement, making it faster, smarter, and more inclusive while never losing sight of the real ecosystems and communities it serves.
The launch of REGEN IRL coincides with Gaia AI’s engagement on the global stage at NYC Climate Week 2025. Gaia AI’s leadership will be sharing their vision at the GloCha UN Headquarters Conference 2025 – “Local Action for Global Challenges: Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies, Innovation & Youth for Our Common Future.” This high-profile event at the United Nations in New York (Sept 18, 2025) brings together innovators, policymakers, and community leaders to explore how digital public infrastructure and emerging tech can empower local climate solutions. The conference focuses on engaging citizens and youth, promoting digital innovation, and localizing the Sustainable Development Goals in an era of climate crisis – a mission that resonates strongly with Gaia AI’s tech-driven, community-centric approach.
At the GloCha conference, Gaia AI co-founders Shawn Anderson and Darren Zal are slated to speak in a session on “Mobilizing Finance for and with Cities”, highlighting how AI and blockchain innovations can channel resources into city and community-led climate action. By participating in Climate Week, Gaia AI aims to amplify the message that local regenerative projects, powered by AI and aligned incentives, can be a cornerstone of global climate strategy. The timing is auspicious: as world leaders discuss policies in New York, Gaia AI and Regen are showcasing a model where grassroots action meets advanced technology to deliver scalable impact. This blend of visionary ambition and grassroots energy – the same spirit driving REGEN IRL – is what Gaia AI will champion on the Climate Week stage, inspiring others to join the regenerative movement.
Beyond the grant competition and public events, Gaia AI and Regen Network are charting a bold long-term course. Central to Gaia AI’s evolving vision is the creation of a universal environmental data legibility layer – essentially a planetary-scale “control panel” for Earth’s health. Gaia AI is building an AI-powered platform to make the planet’s vital signs legible in real time to everyone from local communities to global financial systems. Imagine a global dashboard that continuously visualizes Earth’s key indicators – carbon levels, forest cover, water tables, biodiversity indices – alongside human economic metrics like crop prices or disaster losses. This integrated view, accessible to policymakers, investors, and the public, would reveal the true state of our living planet and how it interplays with our economies.
In practical terms, Gaia’s envisioned application would aggregate massive streams of environmental data (satellite imagery, IoT sensors, community reports) into one harmonized, interactive map of the world. AI analytics would continuously interpret this data, spotting patterns and early warning signs – for example, identifying drought stress in a region and predicting impacts on food supplies or local markets. The goal is to provide actionable intelligence that guides decision-making towards regeneration. “Its core purpose: to make the planet’s health legible to our financial and governance systems in real time,” the Gaia AI team explains. In essence, this “universal environmental data layer” would function as an AI-assisted public ledger of ecological health, akin to how financial indices track economic performance. By making what’s currently invisible (natural capital and ecosystem services) visible and quantifiable, Gaia AI hopes to redirect the flow of capital and attention towards sustaining life.
This ambitious undertaking aligns perfectly with the Gaia AI × Regen philosophy. Regen Network’s open ecological data (credit registries, methodologies, etc.) is one foundation of the legibility layer. Gaia AI has already begun training its agents on Regen’s rich datasets – climate metrics, project data, on-chain records – to serve as “tireless assistants and storytellers” that help anyone navigate and understand environmental information. These AI agents, deployed across platforms like X (Twitter), Telegram, and Discord, act as friendly guides in the ReFi community – answering questions, spreading awareness, and connecting participants globally. It’s a glimpse of a future where AI partners with the living world rather than viewing nature as external. As the Gaia team puts it, “If artificial intelligence becomes truly intelligent, it’s going to partner with the living world.” In other words, true Planetary Intelligence arises when AI systems work in tandem with natural processes and community wisdom.
By pursuing this universal data legibility layer, Gaia AI and Regen aim to exponentialize regenerative capital allocation – directing funds and resources efficiently to where they can achieve the greatest planetary good. It’s about building a Digital Public Infrastructure for Earth: an open, intelligible system that empowers everyone to see ecological reality clearly and act accordingly. This is the deeper mission behind initiatives like REGEN IRL. The grant competition is not only funding discrete projects; it’s also collecting data and stories from the ground to feed into the broader knowledge base, making future AI recommendations smarter and more context-aware. Over time, the insights from funded projects (their challenges, successes, and measured impacts) will enhance the planetary data platform, creating a virtuous cycle of learning and improvement.
With REGEN IRL, we are sending a clear message: the RegenAIssance is here, and everyone is invited to take part. This collaborative competition combines formal commitment with visionary ambition and grassroots action. It speaks to veteran climate strategists and young eco-activists alike – from blockchain labs to community gardens. The tone from Gaia AI is both urgent and hopeful: The challenges are global, but so are the solutions. By leveraging AI and aligned incentives, we can unleash local creativity and stewardship at an unprecedented scale.
“The regenAIssance is accelerating. LFGaia,” the Gaia team cheered in a recent update, infusing the announcement with a rallying cry (“Let’s go, Gaia!”) that captures the mix of serious purpose and energetic optimism driving this movement. Indeed, REGEN IRL is more than a grant; it’s a call to action. Gaia AI and Regen Network invite you to join this grand experiment in blending technology, community, and nature. Whether you’re an innovator with a project idea or a supporter of regenerative causes, now is the time to step forward.
Apply today via https://regen.gaiaai.xyz/irl/, and be part of this next chapter in regenerative finance and action. Together, through intelligence and passion, we can transform small seeds of change into a flourishing forest of impact – for people, for the planet, and for the future.
Share Dialog
Support dialog
