What is an Ecovillage

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An Ecovillage is...

A community where people have deliberately chosen to design their life together around sustainability. That means thinking through how they handle everything from food and energy to decision-making and culture, with the goal of healing rather than harming the place they call home.

No two ecovillages look the same, because each one grows out of the people who live there and what matters most to them. Some are communities built from scratch around a shared vision. Others have been around for centuries villages that are updating age-old ways of life with modern insight. And some are neighborhoods within larger cities, reimagining what urban living can be.

What ties them together isn’t a checklist, it’s a shared way of working:

  • Decisions are made together, by the people who actually live there.
  • Designed with the Map of Regeneration, in which social life, culture, economy, and ecology are considered as one interconnected system.
  • The community actively works to restore, not just protect, the ecological and social world around it.

Today, thousands of these communities exist across the globe, connected through the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN).

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Map of Regeneration

Ok, so you want to become an ecovillage,
how exactly do you do that?

That’s where the Map of Regeneration comes in. It’s GEN’s guide for what regenerative living actually looks like in practice, helping communities figure out where to focus their energy and how their efforts fit into the bigger picture.

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Ecovillage Impact

  • 97% of ecovillages work actively to restore degraded ecosystems.
  • 90% are involved in carbon sequestration through soil and biomass management.
  • Ecovillages contribute significantly to restoring water sources and cycles, with 97% engaging in efforts to replenish these natural systems.
  • By adopting practices such as regenerative agriculture, reforestation, and sustainable water management, ecovillages address both carbon drawdown and biodiversity restoration.
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Information

Communities

A residential project: people live here as their primary home.

Organizations

An institution, business, network, or project that isn’t a residence (e.g. a learning center, farm, or network with no one living there full-time).

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