THE NEXT GREEN REVOLUTION MUST BE REGENERATIVE
Updated: Aug 25
A New Systems Paradigm for Southeast Asia's Food Future
By Robert Steele / Systainability Asia
Not far from where I live in Chiang Mai, there is a mountain that used to be a reddish coloured hue.
Some years ago, I stood on the ridge above Doi Tung, in Chiang Rai province, and looked down on its hillsides terraced with coffee growing in the light-filtering shade of macadamia and native forest trees. It takes a bit of historical imagination to remember that this was not always the case. Thirty-something years ago, more than half the forest of this mountainous region had been virtually stripped away bare - cut for timber, burned for shifting cultivation, and densely planted over with opium poppy plants. At that time, this was the only cash crop available to the ethnic hill communities living on this mountain. Surprisingly, what I was looking at, in that instance, was not a protected forest preserved from harm, but instead I was observing a working landscape, deliberately restored, on the understanding that forest, farm, and family income can exist in harmony together. The biggest insight of this transformation was that the restoration of the forest ecosystem had to be implemented together at the same time with a shift in the community's livelihood system.
This example of transformation of both the ecology and community livelihoods on Doi Tung Mountain communicates what this essay is trying to say better than any framework diagram can. Since the Mae Fah Luang Foundation began the Doi Tung Development Project in 1988, forest cover here has risen from roughly 45 percent to 77 percent, and as the forest has regrown, so has the mountain's own weather. Local rainfall has increased from 1,537 millimetres a year to 2,519. Coffee and macadamia are planted under this regrowth canopy rather than instead of it, and now generate the equivalent of around US$ 4 million a year in local income, and provide employment to around 2,350 people in various jobs ranging from farming to processing, as well as tourism. Forest fires, once quite common, have decreased by 80% since 2008. And across the twenty-nine villages on Doi Tung mountain, 99 percent of children are now enrolled in school, in an area that a generation ago had almost none.
I feel that nobody at Doi Tung set out to solve six problems at once. They set out to give people on that mountain a legal and sufficient way to live without cutting down the forest that provided clean water to the downstream rivers. But because forest, farm, income, and education were all integrated in the original project formulation (not four separate projects), a single investment produced returns in all four areas simultaneously. There is a word for this type of integrated problem-solving, though in 1988, it didn't yet exist. The systems biologist Elizabeth Sawin calls this type of approach "multisolving." Essentially, multisolving is designing an intervention to deliberately serve several goals at once, rather than noting the overlap afterward as a positive secondary outcome in a donor report. It is a simple enough idea that it barely seems to need a name. Multisolving is essentially "systems thinking." This is important because almost every institution we have built to plan, fund, and evaluate development work has, until recently, been built to make multisolving nearly invisible. For example, most people look at a coffee terrace and only ask whether it counts as agriculture or forestry, whereas, at Doi Tung, it is treated as both of these things, as well as a watershed and an education intervention, all on the same hillside, at the same time.
From my observation, this is still the dominant assumption of many food-security projects in this region; i.e. the region's food future depends chiefly on producing more yield, more calories, more tonnes per hectare, etc., and that everything else, the forests and rivers and even the coral reefs the food depends on, is a separate agenda for other ministries to deal with once the more difficult problem of food production is solved. It is not a foolish assumption. It is the assumption that drove the first Green Revolution some 60 years ago, which did pull hundreds of millions of people in Asia back from famine. It is not a foolish assumption to make. It was this assumption that drove the first Green Revolution, which gathered pace across Asia through the 1960s and 70s and did, genuinely, pull hundreds of millions of people back from the brink of famine. But it is no longer sufficient, and pretending otherwise is no longer merely harmless rhetorical thinking. The convergence of multiple global issues that we now face, some of which could be considered existential, such as climate instability, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, water stress, air pollution, and a rural inequality that rising GDP, will not respond in the way we want using the same solutions from the past. What is required is not a more production aimed at larger harvest.
What is required is an entirely different relationship between the harvest end product, and everything that makes it possible. What is required is an entire shift towards a regenerative cultural mindset, system and relationship with the Earth.
There is an important distinction worth emphasizing here, because the word regenerative in this essay's title is not a new, trendy synonym or substitute for the concept of sustainable. The regenerative-design theorist Daniel Christian Wahl draws the distinction quite clearly. Wahl has written that sustainability, honestly practiced, is essentially about trying to stop the bleeding; i.e. to do less harm to a system already depleted past the point where its own resilience can absorb more pressure. Regeneration asks for more than simply halting destructive and harmful practices. It asks that the land be nurtured to that it is more biologically productive, ecologically healthier, and more diverse than it was when it was received. Returning to our example of Doi Tung; it was not merely sustained, rather it was regenerated. It has been stewarded back to a healthier condition than it was in the past, which is a very different land use philosophy and system, and the only one actually worth practicing now.
Doi Tung is one working answer to what this new human-land relationship looks like in practice. Multiply it, vary it by landscape and community, and the shape of something Southeast Asia's food systems have long needed a name for starts to come into view. I call it the Nested Regenerative Systems Framework. I am not advocating for another sustainable-agriculture model to shelve alongside other such models, but a way of seeing six layers of one living system, each dependent on the health of the layer beneath it.
The physicist and systems thinker Fritjof Capra has spent much of his career showing that living systems function through networks of relationships. They maintain themselves through continuous processes of renewal, adaptation and exchange. Seen in this way, a regenerative food system is not simply borrowing a metaphor from nature. It is learning to work more like nature itself; i.e. building the diversity, connections and feedback processes that allow living systems to remain healthy and resilient over time.
At the center of the framework is agrobiodiversity, the biological foundation upon which the rest of the system depends. It includes the diversity of crops, livestock, pollinators, soil organisms and wild foods, as well as the many useful species found within agricultural and forest landscapes, such as bamboo, mushrooms, medicinal plants, edible ferns and honey-producing bees. At Doi Tung, we can see this principle in practice. Coffee is grown beneath a diverse tree canopy that includes macadamia and native forest species, creating a much more complex agroforestry system than coffee grown as a monoculture. This diversity provides multiple products and income opportunities while also supporting healthier soils, habitat, water regulation and greater resilience to climate and other stresses. Remove this biological diversity, and the resilience of everything that depends upon it begins to weaken.
The second inner layer located from the core is the agroecology layer. This layer rest on the ecological principles that let a farm effectively interact (or dance in the words of Donella Meadows) with other elements in the ecosystem in a dynamic relationship rather than something that dominates, cancels and overrides them. The actors in this dance play roles like nutrient cycling, pest regulation, pollination, water retention, soil biology, and are treated as part of the farm system design rather than issues to be worked on afterward with additional inputs. This is the layer where Doi Tung's mountain choreographs this system relationship dance through variations in shade and root structure, continuous decomposition of leaf litter and other detritus – something that intensive monoculture farming has tried to do with chemical fertiliser and engineered irrigation instead.
Regenerative agriculture forms the third layer of the framework. Put simply, it is agroecology translated into everyday farming practice: building soil organic matter, using compost and cover crops, integrating trees and livestock, rotating and diversifying crops, reducing unnecessary soil disturbance, and making better use of the ecological processes already at work on the farm. The aim is not simply to reduce the damage caused by agriculture, but to progressively restore soil health, biodiversity, water cycles and the overall resilience of the farm.
I want to be clear, however, that this is not a call to turn back the clock or romanticise traditional agriculture. Regenerative agriculture can draw equally from traditional knowledge, modern science, farmer innovation and appropriate technology. What matters is the direction of travel: moving away from farming systems that depend increasingly on external inputs and towards systems that work with the ecology of the landscape. The farm becomes not something separate from nature, but a functioning part of the living system around it.
But no farm, however well managed, can carry the responsibility for regeneration on its own. Farmers operate within a much larger system of markets, finance, procurement, processing and supply chains that ultimately determine whether ecological stewardship is rewarded or whether short-term extraction remains the more profitable choice. This is why regenerative agriculture needs to extend beyond the farm into what I would describe as a regenerative food system.
Doi Tung provides a useful example of what this can look like in practice. Rather than expecting farmers to restore the landscape while continuing to operate within the same economic system, the project helped build the market around them. The Doi Tung brand, processing facilities, cafés and retail outlets created value from products grown within the restored landscape and allowed more of that value to remain within the local economy. From what I have learned, by around 2000 the Doi Tung brand had become financially self-sustaining. The important lesson is that ecological restoration and economic development were not treated as competing objectives. The market itself became part of the regenerative strategy.
This system doesn’t stop with the transformed food systems. The system needs to extend even further. Regenerative food systems ultimately depend on the health of the wider regenerative landscapes in which they are embedded. This means looking beyond individual farms to the forests, rivers, wetlands and watersheds that surround them and, where these systems extend to the coast, to mangroves, seagrass meadows and coral reefs. Rather than managing each of these as separate sectors or jurisdictions, we need to understand and manage the ecological connections between them as parts of one larger living landscape.
Again, Doi Tung offers a useful example of this landscape approach. Forest management there combines three complementary functions across the mountain: protection forest to conserve watersheds and ecological functions, sustainable use forest where communities can sustainably harvest food and other materials, and economic forest supporting livelihoods through crops such as coffee and macadamia. The important point here is that conservation, community use and economic production are not treated as completely separate or competing objectives. Instead, they are viewed as different functions of the same landscape, managed interactively together to support both people and ecological recovery.
At the outer layer of the Nested Regenerative Systems Framework is the outcome towards which all of these changes should ultimately lead: a nature-positive society. This is a society in which restoring the health of nature also strengthens human wellbeing, livelihoods and opportunity, rather than forcing people to choose between them. In other words, people prosper because the living systems around them are recovering, and that recovery can continue because local people have a genuine stake in protecting and managing them.
The challenge is how to protect, strengthen and connect these existing assets while combining them with new science, technology, investment and innovation. This is where we need to look beyond the nested system itself to the enabling conditions that allow regeneration to happen at scale. Farmers and communities cannot make this transition alone. Their choices are shaped by agricultural policies, subsidies, land and resource rights, markets, finance, research, extension services, infrastructure, public procurement and the incentives created by the wider economy.
Doi Tung provides a powerful example of what this can look like in practice. The transformation has not only been ecological. More than 99 percent of children are now in school, forest fire damage has reportedly fallen by around 80 percent since 2008, and the opium cultivation that once provided one of the few viable sources of cash income has been replaced by a much more diverse local economy built around coffee, macadamia, handicrafts, tourism and other livelihood opportunities. The important point is that improvements in forests, livelihoods and social wellbeing have occurred together and have
This is what I mean by a nature-positive society. It is not simply another environmental slogan, nor does it mean protecting nature at the expense of people. It means creating the conditions in which healthier ecosystems support healthier and more resilient communities, and those communities, in turn, have both the means and the incentive to care for the landscapes upon which they depend.
Institutions Built to Divide
None of what I’ve just describe will transform automatically. This is because the institutions we have set up to manage food, forests, water, and biodiversity were built, over the past half-century, to divide reality into manageable compartmentalized pieces. Agriculture became the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture. Forests belonged to forestry departments. Fisheries were managed separately, and health, education, water, finance, and biodiversity each grew their own policies, their own budgets, their own institutional cultures, largely without reference to one another.
In reality, Nature has never accepted those boundaries.
Rivers have ignored them.
Pollinators have ignored them.
Fish have ignored them.
Soil organisms have ignored them.
Climate has ignored them.
The result is exactly what you would expect: interconnected problems, addressed by disconnected institutions, each optimising its own piece of a system none of them was designed to see whole.
An Inheritance to Build From
Southeast Asia is not starting from scratch in making the transition towards regenerative agriculture and food systems. In many respects, the foundations already exist. The region has extraordinary crop and livestock diversity, centuries-old rice traditions, agroforestry and home gardens, community forests, rice–fish systems, mangrove-based livelihoods, non-timber forest product economies, and generations of diverse Indigenous and local ecological knowledge. Many of these systems have been sustaining food, livelihoods and biodiversity long before the concepts of regenerative agriculture or nature-positive development entered our policy vocabulary.
The challenge for us now is how to protect, strengthen and connect these existing assets while combining them with new science, technology, investment and innovation. This is where we need to look beyond the nested system itself to the enabling conditions that allow regeneration to happen at scale. Farmers and communities cannot make this transition alone. Their choices are shaped by agricultural policies, subsidies, land and resource rights, markets, finance, research, extension services, infrastructure, public procurement and the incentives created by the wider economy.
What is missing, therefore, is not necessarily another new farming model. It is greater coherence across the policies, institutions, finance and markets that determine which kind of food system succeeds. If these enabling conditions continue to reward monocultures, excessive inputs, short-term production and ecosystem conversion, regenerative approaches will remain at the margins. If they instead reward diversity, stewardship, restoration and long-term resilience, the different layers of the Nested Regenerative Systems Framework can begin to reinforce one another. This is where policy becomes one of the most important leverage points for transformation.
That requires a handful of deliberate paradigm shifts, including shifting from monoculture productivity to a diversified and resilient farming system; from farm-level practice and pilot projects to integrated landscape-scale planning; from treating conservation and agriculture as opposing adversaries, to treating ecosystem and biodiversity conservation as something agriculture can actively participate in; from short-term yield to long-term ecosystem function; and from isolated projects to enabling policy, finance and institutional coordination that will let empower the initial projects to scale and multiply.
Creating the Conditions for Regeneration
None of this will happen through the efforts of farmers alone. Farmers make decisions within a much wider system of policies, markets, finance, land and resource rights, public investment and economic incentives. If we want regenerative practices to become the norm rather than remain at the margins, stewardship needs to become an economically viable and rewarding choice, not an additional cost that farmers and communities are expected to carry themselves.
This requires governments to rethink many of the signals they send through policy and public spending. Payments for ecosystem services can reward farmers and communities for protecting watersheds, forests and biodiversity. Ecological fiscal transfers can give provinces and districts a financial incentive to maintain healthy landscapes. Agricultural subsidies can be redirected away from practices that contribute to ecosystem degradation and towards agroforestry, diversified farming and family food forests. Public procurement can create reliable markets for nutritious, locally produced and biodiversity-friendly food, particularly through schools, hospitals and other public institutions.
Just as importantly, secure land and resource rights can give communities the confidence to invest in long-term stewardship of forests, fisheries and non-timber forest products. Green, carbon and blue finance can help mobilise investment for forest, mangrove and landscape restoration, while support for traditional crop varieties and local seed systems can strengthen agrobiodiversity and resilience. At the landscape level, integrated watershed and coastal planning can begin to reconnect decisions made upstream with their consequences downstream, recognising that what happens on a mountain may ultimately affect the river, mangrove or coral reef below.
These should not be viewed as a collection of separate policy interventions. They are enabling parts of the same regenerative system. Policy influences finance, finance shapes investment, markets influence what farmers produce, land and resource rights affect whether communities invest in long-term stewardship, and landscape planning determines whether decisions in one place support or undermine outcomes elsewhere. The real opportunity is therefore not simply to introduce more regenerative policies, but to make them coherent and mutually reinforcing.
That may ultimately be the most important policy shift of all: moving from policies that manage agriculture, biodiversity, climate, water and rural development separately towards policies that recognise they are different parts of the same living system.
CONCLUSION AND WAY FORWARD
The next Green Revolution must feed people, while also restoring the landscapes and ecosystem function that feed and support us via multiple ecosystem services and provisions. The defining challenge for humanity now is not producing more from less, but learning, once again, how to prosper within the living systems that have always sustained us. Southeast Asia, with its extraordinary biological diversity, its depth of cultural knowledge and traditions, and now, on at least one mountainside, its proof of concept, may yet show the rest of the world that the future of agriculture is not simply more production and yield, but the flourishing of an entire living regenerative system.
Where This Series Goes Next
This essay is the starting point for a series that will explore each layer of the Nested Regenerative Systems Framework in greater depth, while looking at the policies, finance, markets and governance needed to make the transition possible. And although Doi Tung provides a powerful example of how these ideas can come together in one landscape, the series will draw on experiences from across Southeast Asia.
In Trat Province on Thailand's eastern seaboard, for example, communities have worked to restore mangrove forests damaged by charcoal production, aquaculture and other pressures. As the mangroves recovered and communities strengthened local management of their fisheries, crab populations and other species began to return. This provides a very different setting for exploring regenerative landscapes, particularly the connections between community livelihoods, coastal ecosystems and the waters that connect land and sea.
In Nan Province in northern Thailand, the story is again different. Communities living in one of the country's important upper watersheds have increasingly become involved in managing and restoring forests on which people far downstream also depend. Nan reminds us that decisions about agriculture, forests and land use in an upland province are not simply local environmental decisions. They also influence water security, climate resilience and livelihoods elsewhere. This is where the series will explore the importance of policy coherence and landscape governance, and why decisions made in one part of a living system cannot be separated from their consequences in another.
The series will also look more closely at regenerative food systems and finance. Regeneration will struggle to move beyond individual projects unless capital, markets and investment begin supporting the same outcomes we are asking farmers and communities to deliver. The emerging idea of systemic capital, being developed by Ernesto van Peborgh, offers an interesting way of thinking about this: capital that circulates through and strengthens a living system rather than simply extracting financial value from it. Doi Tung provides an early practical example. By developing its own processing, brands and markets, it did not wait for the existing economy to reward better stewardship. It helped create an economic system in which restoration and livelihoods could reinforce one another.
Across these future essays, the central argument will remain the same. We cannot regenerate food systems without regenerating biodiversity. We cannot regenerate biodiversity without transforming agriculture. And we cannot transform agriculture unless we begin to see farms, forests, rivers, wetlands and seas as connected parts of the same living system.
For Southeast Asia, this is much more than an environmental agenda. It is simultaneously about food and nutrition security, public health, climate mitigation and adaptation, rural livelihoods, water security and biodiversity. These challenges are already interconnected in the landscapes where people live and produce their food. Our policies, institutions and investments now need to become equally connected.
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