The Terra Project

A Systemic Solution to Sustainability

by Bernard Lietaer

A systemic conflict exists between corporate short-term priorities and the long-term needs of society. Today, corporations are the ones making many of the most important decisions about our collective future: what technologies, energies, products we will be able to use decades from now. What each of us wear, hear, read and do, are all shaped by that fact. Furthermore, corporate leaders are obliged by financial markets to focus only on short-term results, leaving as unresolved legacies many of our global problems, ranging from climate change to peak oil. As long as our most important decisions are driven by short-term thinking, giving birth to a long-term sustainable society is going to remain a naïve pipe-dream.

Most efforts to correct this situation are addressing only symptoms instead of the system driving it all. Such efforts include introducing regulations, providing tax incentives favoring specific technologies, or applying moral pressure. The systemic solution, in contrast, would be to make it profitable for corporations to think long-term, and therefore to spontaneously invest in long-term solutions. This is achievable by convincing corporations to use for planning and global asset allocation a currency specifically designed to resolve the conflict between corporate short-term priorities and the long-term needs of society, so that the vast capacities of global corporations can be harnessed towards sustainability without needing to rely only on regulations and moral pressure. To persuade them to implement and use the Terra, this mechanism is also designed to address several other immediate problems that corporations face in today’s global monetary environment: the lack of an international standard of value, global monetary instabilities, and the uncertainties about the dollar itself. The Terra Project is a non-profit initiative aiming at preparing the information and providing the impulse for corporations to implement this new tool.

Technically, the Terra is an inventory receipt used as a supra-national trading currency. It is defined as a standardized basket of the most important commodities and services in the global market for which futures markets are either already established or could be if useful (e.g. oil, wheat, copper, etc., and some standardizable services such as Carbon Credits). Because it is fully backed by a physical inventory of commodities, the Terra would be a very robust international standard of value. It is different from previous commodity-basked proposals by having the storage costs of the basket paid by the bearer of the currency, making it a “demurrage charged” currency (the opposite of interest), a device that insures its circulation as a trading tool. The Terra would also be an inflation-resistant currency, ideal to be able to compare results and contributions independently of the vagaries of the values of national moneys. Last but not least, the demurrage feature would realign financial interests with longer-term concerns, eliminating the conflict between financial priorities and long-term priorities including environmental concerns.

The proofs for claims made above, as well as more details on its practical applicability today are available in the Terra White Paper PDF here and on www.terratrc.org or email Bernard Lietaer.

The Terra Project is a fiscally sponsored non-profit project of Planetwork NGO, Inc. a CA 501(c)3. All donations are fully tax deductible to the full extent allowable by law.