empowering everyone to make

truly sustainable decisions

The world as we know it is at great risk. Unsustainable global practices continuously harm the Earth and its ecosystems, and four of the planetary boundaries for sustainable development have already been exceeded as a result of human activity. A failure to act swiftly and purposefully to breach out of business-as-usual and adopt sustainable practices will result in irreversible environmental changes to the detriment of human well-being.

The clock is ticking, and the international community spearheaded by the United Nations has set 2030 as the deadline. That is less than one decade to fulfill the ambitions outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) put forth in the 2030 Agenda. There is a ubiquitous public demand for a healthy, sustainable future. This is reflected in the business world, where companies’ competitive advantage is increasingly being influenced by their ability to respond to sustainability matters, and investors keep setting stricter ESG requirements.

At the same time, fake news, profit-driven studies, superficial sustainability campaigns and greenwashing clutter the market. Within all that clutter, there is still no objective or generally accepted way to represent sustainability, let alone in a comparable manner. Existing reporting standards remain disconnected, voluntary to use, and subjectively tailorable, rendering companies’ reported sustainability impacts highly unreliable and non-comparable. As we enter this decade of action, we do so without the required tools to collaborate, document, and measure our progress toward the SDGs and sustainability at large. We are stuck in a thick fog, and there is no verified, transparent way to assess sustainability.

How can we reach our sustainability goals without a way to measure our success?

We cannot.

That is the gap TERRAVERA™ strives to fill.

We believe that technology and global collaboration in harmonious combination with innovative thinking and courage to shake up the status quo are what it takes to achieve great things for our common world. Our vision is to define true sustainability, and by that enable everyone to make the right decisions.

We acknowledge that our vision is beyond ambitious, and that what we are trying to achieve is so monumental that no-one has ever come close to realizing it. Although we are bold, we are still humble enough to recognize that such a daunting challenge cannot be undertaken alone. That is why TERRAVERA™ aims to create an open, global platform for uniting knowledge and facilitating transparent sustainability measurement across all industries. But just like Rome was not built in a day, defining and measuring true sustainability will take years of hard, dedicated, interdisciplinary and collaborative work to achieve.

To get the boulder rolling, we have started developing a digital infrastructure that will act as the epicenter of all sustainability assessments. At the core of this infrastructure lies a set of tools (within a digital platform) that can be utilized to model reality and evaluate sustainability in a transparent way. Researchers and field matter experts in academia, qualified contributors and leading research institutions collaborate to define interconnected models that are implemented using the platform toolkit. All efforts toward such model development are carried out independently and without any conflicts of interest, for the sole purpose of contributing to defining true sustainability.

We strive to make our technology accessible and easy to use for everyone to gain sustainability insights and make more informed decisions based on these. The ultimate aspiration of TERRAVERA™ is to empower people to act based on facts, and thus drive the world toward a more sustainable allocation of our scarce resources.

In order to carry out our mission, TERRAVERA™ is developing a dynamic and highly scalable digital infrastructure and platform for sustainability that is publicly available to view and collaborate on. By creating models for companies, industries, economic activities, and products & services within the platform – and mapping the connections between them – it is possible to develop an interconnected web of models representing complex value chains or value networks. We then assess sustainability by funneling data through scientifically grounded models and evaluating data points against a set of transparent criteria, resulting in a final scoring. In addition to independently developed models for sustainability, the platform supports integration of established frameworks such as the EU Taxonomy.

Technically, TERRAVERA's digital infrastructure can be categorized as Platform as a service (PaaS), where the users are responsible for their own applications and data, although we do provide some applications as well. The platform itself is also capable of retrieving and aggregating data securely, all through one unified portal. All internal and external communication with the TERRAVERA™ platform happens through an API, which allows for the development of a digital ecosystem surrounding the platform. This means that you are free to develop and connect your own applications to the platform as you wish, for instance your ERP or procurement system. TERRAVERA™ is also developing tools on top of the same infrastructure, currently including TerraLight, TerraCalc and TerraPortal.