Status: Index · Draft. An early composite measure; its components and their weighting are not yet settled.
The Regeneration Index is a composite measure of whether value cycles replenish their sources or deplete them over time. Where a single impact score evaluates a change at a moment, the index evaluates a direction: run this cycle repeatedly, and do its sources grow or shrink?
What it measures
Every value-creating cycle draws on stocks of capital — natural, social, human, and economic. For each source, the index asks whether the cycle returns more than it takes (regeneration) or draws the stock down and defers the cost (extraction). Depletion registers as a 0TRUECOST — a real cost that a point-in-time score, taken before the reserve runs low, will miss. The index is thus a measure of a slope rather than a level: two cycles can report the same net impact today while one is rebuilding its sources and the other is spending them.
Structure
- Source stocks. The natural, social, human, and economic sources a cycle depends on.
- Replenishment balance. For each source, the net direction over a cycle — restored or drawn down.
- Time horizon. The window over which the balance is assessed, since regeneration and depletion become visible only across repetitions.
- Composite. An aggregate read of whether the cycle, overall, is net-replenishing or net-depleting.
The unsettled problem
The index is a draft chiefly because its composition is unresolved. Aggregating gains and losses across dissimilar sources — a strengthened community set against a diminished watershed — requires weighting choices that are matters of judgment, not calculation. Fixing those weights prematurely would lend the index a false authority. It is published in draft so that the weighting can be worked out in view, with its assumptions open to challenge.
Relationship to the other instruments
The Regeneration Index complements the Impact Measurement Protocol by adding the dimension a single score omits: sustainment over time. A cycle can post a positive net impact and still be extractive if it is quietly consuming the sources that make it possible. The index is the instrument built to surface that difference before the reserve, and the true cost, come due.