The framework, in depth.

Why eight criteria, and what sits outside them.

The group's starting inventory is Askja's twelve metrics. The demonstration holds the eight that reduce to a sourced number in a native unit at regional scale, each with a threshold the viewer can set: climate trajectory, water stress, soil organic carbon, forest-cover trajectory, solar-energy potential, conflict proximity, regenerative-network density and population density. They share the one property that makes them filterable: each is a sourced number in a native unit. Each criterion keeps the number of its metric in Askja's set, printed in the grid below; the numbers identify metrics and say nothing about importance. Each axis can end a project on its own, which is why none is folded into another.

Three further things sit beside the eight sliders and are not numbers on a scale. First, seven per-jurisdiction layers (legal ownership, land cost, hospital access, demographic trajectory, soil contamination, water source control and climate buffering) appear on every region page as qualitative records, each with its source, its confidence and its gaps. Second, four categorical filters on the home page read those records: Foreign ownership, Affordability, Climate buffering and Legal direction. They filter the way the sliders do: a region either matches the option chosen or it does not, and nothing is added up. Third, every region carries a Land standing entry and a legal pathway, described under ethics below, which are never scored and never filtered.

Legal and cost questions come first in practice: before soil or climate matter, a reader has to know who may buy, what may be built and what the land costs, and the region pages carry those records for that reason. That is an observation about how arriving works. It is not a ranking: the framework assigns no priority between criteria, and every slider and filter is independent of the others. A categorical fact such as who may buy land in a given country is not a point on a scale, and forcing it onto a slider would be the false quantification the framework refuses.

Other criteria were considered and are out, for stated reasons. Cultural and lifestyle fit is out because the group's Decision 6 puts subjective dimensions outside V1: they do not live in datasets. Two things people often fold into fit are carried elsewhere on purpose. Language and the manner of entry are written into each region's Land standing entry as sourced prose (the Galway Gaeltacht entry, for instance, names the Irish-language conditions of the county plan). A composite coherence score is out under the no-composite rule below. The pruning principle is unchanged: keep as a filter only what reduces to a checkable number, and hold everything else as sourced prose.

Each criterion is measured in its own native unit, drawn from a named public dataset. The grid below is generated from the criteria the dashboard actually holds: what each one measures, the unit it is reported in, its window, its source and licence, and how its trajectory is read. Where a criterion has no trajectory, the grid says so.

State paired with trajectory.

A current value tells the practitioner what a region is now; a trajectory tells them where it is heading. The framework holds the two side by side rather than folding one into the other. Every cell carries a state and, where the data allow one, a trajectory: a direction (rising, falling or steady), the size of the change, and the rule that produced it. Five criteria carry a direction (climate trajectory, water stress, forest cover trajectory, conflict proximity and population density). Three carry a state only (soil organic carbon, solar PV potential and regenerative network density), and the grid says why: there is no open regional trend dataset for soil carbon, the solar product is a long-term average, and the network count is a single baseline wave. Where a direction is a projection, the cell says so and names the scenario (F-6).

Climate is the case where state and trajectory sit closest. The value on the dashboard is not today's weather but the mid-century projection: the 2041–2060 mean annual air temperature from the 17-model WorldClim CMIP6 ensemble under SSP2-4.5, averaged over the region's footprint. Alentejo reads 18.3°C, West Cork and Connemara 11.1°C and Transylvania 9.3°C, each a projected state that already encodes the warming a fifty-year project is planning into. The trajectory field gives the change against WorldClim's 1970–2000 over the same cells: 2°C, 1.3°C and 3°C.

Water stress is a ratio, and the page says what kind. WRI's Aqueduct 4.0 technical note defines baseline water stress as the ratio of total water demand to available renewable surface and groundwater supplies, calculated for each HydroBASINS level-6 sub-basin, and converts the raw ratio to risk categories and to a 0–5 score. The dashboard shows the raw ratio for the 2050 business-as-usual scenario (SSP3-7.0), area-weighted over the sub-basins of the footprint, with WRI's own class names (low under 0.1 up to extremely high above 0.8). It is not a rescaled score of the framework's own, and it passes 1 where demand exceeds supply: Alentejo reads 1.505, Transylvania 0.415 and Connemara 0.011. The cell stores the 2050 value only. The baseline ratio (1979–2019) is not stored as a second value; the trajectory field stores the change from it, and the two scenario families (climate on SSP2-4.5, water on SSP3-7.0) are labelled as different futures.

Forest cover is the pure-trend case, where the number is the trajectory. Hansen Global Forest Change tracks tree cover at 30-metre resolution, and the framework reads it as net change per decade: gain recorded for 2000–2012 minus gross loss for 2001–2023, as a share of the year-2000 canopy. Alentejo reads −11.2% per decade, West Cork and Connemara −3.2% and Transylvania −1.5%. Under this definition every footprint on the slate reads below zero, because Hansen records gain only to 2012, counts harvest and fire as loss and does not count regrowth after 2012; the number says that canopy was lost and cannot say why. It is a trajectory to read with land-use history, not a verdict on a forest.

No composite scoring.

One of the working group's non-negotiables is that the framework never produces a single composite score across criteria (F-1, F-2). A composite requires coefficients: how much rainfall offsets a degree of warming, how much cheap land offsets a thin civil-society stack. Once those coefficients live inside the framework, the framework is making the decision instead of the practitioner. Composites also let a region with one fatal flaw look acceptable because compensating values average it away, which is exactly the failure mode for fifty-year decisions where no flaw is averageable. Alentejo makes the point concretely: its solar resource reads 1,643 kWh/kWp/yr (Global Solar Atlas, long-term average) while its 2050 water-stress ratio reads 1.505. A composite would let the sun pull the water problem back toward the middle of a range, yet a settlement there has to close its water budget whatever the sun gives it. Averaging buries the one number that matters. The alternative is filtering (F-3): each criterion has a threshold the viewer sets, regions within every threshold stay visible and regions outside any one threshold dim. The shape of the result is a smaller set, never a ranked list.

Native units throughout.

Temperature stays in degrees Celsius, soil organic carbon in g/kg, water stress as WRI's ratio, forest change in percent per decade, solar output in kWh/kWp/yr, conflict as an event count and population as persons per km². Land prices are not a criterion: they sit in the land-cost record of each region page, in the currency of the source and with its year. The framework refuses to reshape every variable onto one normalised grid, because reshaping costs information (F-4). The modifiable areal unit problem (MAUP), familiar to anyone who has worked with spatial data, has two parts: the scale effect, where statistics change as the unit of aggregation changes, and the zoning effect, where they change as the boundaries shift. Keeping each variable in its native unit, at the scale where it makes sense, is the discipline the framework chose over visual neatness.

In practice each criterion is read at the resolution its source actually resolves, from a 30 m forest raster to level-6 river sub-basins (the grid above gives each native unit). Reshaping them all onto one universal grid, an H3 hexagon say, would either blur the 30 m forest signal or invent 30 m detail for a climate model that never produced it, and either way manufacture a precision the data does not hold. The zoning effect bites just as hard. Alentejo's footprint mean for water stress hides a spread: its sub-basins run from 0.14 to 2.44, which is why the cell records the range in its label. The aggregation scale is not a cosmetic choice; it changes the number the practitioner reads.

Source, vintage and licence for every value.

Every value the framework presents carries three things. A source, a named public dataset. A vintage, the year or scenario the value represents: "2041–2060, SSP2-4.5" for a climate projection, "2050 business-as-usual" for water stress, "2001–2023" for a forest trend. And a licence, the terms under which the data may be reused. The licence is stated per source, and per value only where a cell cites a source of its own; the source list below records, for each source, the page that states its licence. Where the provider's page states none, or could not be opened, the entry reads "licence not confirmed", and a licence is never inferred from a dataset's reputation. Most of the numerical backbone is CC BY 4.0. WorldClim is free for non-commercial use only. Two map layers are non-commercial (GEM seismic hazard and EOxCloudless imagery) and the Esri layers are under Esri's licence, so a commercial use would need a licence or a swap; the group has no commercial product (F-5).

Two levels of sourcing are worth telling apart. The criterion-level source is the dataset named in the grid above. The cell-level source is what a single value cites. In the current data the two are the same for every cell: each of the eight criteria is computed for every region from one dataset, over a footprint recorded for that region (an administrative polygon, a bounding box or a disc, whichever the cell names), by scripts the group runs by hand. The regional and national sources a reader will meet elsewhere, statutes, planning plans and statistical offices, back the Land standing, legal-pathway and land-cost records, and each is listed under the criterion or layer it serves.

On a fifty-to-hundred-year decision, vintage and licence are not bureaucratic footnotes, they are the point. A climate projection is a model run that will be re-run: newer ensembles, revised pathways and better downscaling will move the numbers, and a value stamped "2041–2060, SSP2-4.5, WorldClim CMIP6" tells a community exactly which run to re-check it against. The group keeps per-region research notes; the sources they cite are listed here. No value without a source, no source without a vintage, no claim that cannot be re-checked: where two sources disagree the cell says so, and where a value could not be reproduced it is left as a stated gap rather than a number. Transparency is what lets a place that will outlive this dataset check it for itself.

The 23 map layers, and the gaps not shipped.

The interactive map carries 23 toggleable layers, grouped into six themes. Seventeen are live public services, each with its own attribution, read in the visitor's browser, so the provider can change or withdraw them. Six are processed files the site serves itself. WorldClim is a criterion source, not a map layer: the map draws no temperature layer from it.

• Climate & water: Precipitation — live service; Water stress 2050 — processed file; Water depletion 2050 — processed file; Climate zones 1991-2020 (Köppen-Geiger) — processed file; Climate zones 2041-2070 (Köppen-Geiger, SSP2-4.5) — processed file.
• Land & soil: Forest loss — live service; Soil organic carbon — live service; Land cover (10m) — live service; Land cover, ESA WorldCover 2021 (10 m) — live service.
• Energy: Solar PV potential — live service.
• Hazards: Coastal flood / SLR — live service; River flood depth, 1-in-50-year (1960-1999) — live service; River flood depth, 2050 (SSP2/RCP4.5) — live service; River flood depth, 2050 (SSP3/RCP8.5) — live service; Seismic hazard — live service.
• People & access: Population density — live service; Travel time to cities — live service; Conflict density — processed file; Ecovillage sites — processed file.
• Terrain & imagery: Terrain relief — live service; Topographic map — live service; Recent satellite — live service; Night lights — live service.

What the map does not ship is as honest as what it does. Layers that were probed and did not hold up are retired and recorded in the layer registry with the reason: a drought indicator that covers Europe only, surface-temperature layers whose units could not be confirmed, a flood layer that rendered as a flat colour, and an aridity index that covers Australia only. Aridity is carried by the Köppen climate-zone layers instead. Rather than fake a layer with a proxy dressed up as the real thing, the map leaves it out and says so.

Composite scores.

The first tension is whether a regenerative-settlement framework should ever produce a single composite "livability" or "suitability" score across criteria.

Weighting authority.

The second tension is about who decides how much a given criterion matters.

Both tensions are deliberately deferred to V2 design. This site, the demonstration and V1 alike, neither scores nor weights: it filters, and lets the viewer apply their own thresholds. The viewer who needs the framework to do more than that should treat it as a sketch and wait for the next layer, or read the sources listed below.

Localism. Decisions about land are made well primarily by people whose lives are continuous with the place. A tool that helps a stranger imagine a place cannot substitute for the slow work of becoming someone the place knows.

Bioregioning. Thinking in terms of watersheds, ecotones and cultural geographies rather than national borders and real-estate markets. A region can contain three watersheds and three different settlement traditions, and the bioregional scale is the scale that actually matters for land that is meant to last a century.

Reciprocity. Reciprocity is inseparable from bioregioning: you cannot live within the grain of a place while displacing the people already in it. Much of this land — Mi'kma'ki in Nova Scotia, the unceded Sinixt, Ktunaxa and Syilx territories of the Kootenays, the Zapotec, Mixtec and Chatino highlands of Oaxaca — is held in Indigenous or communal title, and arriving means entering obligation with the people, lifeways and nations already rooted there, not acquiring something empty. Where arriving in a place would harm the community already there, the honest answer is not to go. This tool exists to help people belong to and regenerate a place — never to land on a community already living there.

What that means in the tool. Every region page opens with whose land it is, in the words of the people where they have published them and in sourced facts where they have not. A region can carry a plain statement of the forms of arrival for which the answer is not there. First conversations lists public bodies to read, never people to contact. None of this is scored, ranked or used as a filter: a number would let a group buy down a people's standing against cheaper land.

Land standing is a qualitative record for each region: whose land it is, the tenure, how arriving in good faith works, and what that asks of an arrival, each with its sources (F-7, F-10, F-45). Assembled from public sources and checked on 5 October 2026. No nation or community named here has reviewed this entry. The words matter: an entry is checked against opened public sources, which is not review, consent or approval by anyone it names. The legal pathway block beside it lays out, in order, what lawful entry involves in the sources opened; it describes how the law and the process are laid out and is not legal advice, and where the law bars a structure it says so and offers no way round it (F-50, F-52).

"Not there" is a legitimate answer, never a gap to be worked around (F-42). In practice it is a short, sourced sentence on a region's page naming a form of arrival for which the answer is not there; nineteen of the thirty regions carry one. The demonstration also applies it before a region reaches the slate: regions where arriving would harm the community already there, and regions that are already amenity-migration hotspots, were left off, and none is named here. A region joins the slate only with complete sourced values, or an honest gap with its reason, and a Land standing entry checked against opened public sources (F-58). Where a region stays on the slate although one way of arriving there would harm, its page says so in that statement.

The bioregion layer is a descriptive reading and not a boundary. For each region it names the ecoregions (RESOLVE Ecoregions 2017) that overlap a disc of 100 km around the region's reference point, with shares rounded to five percent, and the river basin the water drains to. A disc is not the region's footprint, regions at an edge straddle ecoregions, and the polygons shown are simplified. Cultural bioregions, meaning the people, language and land tradition of a place, cannot be derived from a dataset: they are carried in prose, in Land standing and in what living there asks (F-54 to F-57).

The two continents are framed differently, on purpose (F-43). In North America an entry names the Indigenous nation or nations whose land it is, and what is known of its treaty and cession history, from the nations' own sources where they could be reached. In Europe it names the rooted community, the commons or the land tradition, a parish commons, a village assembly or a farm-family tenure, because that is usually the relationship in question, and it does not impose an Indigenous frame where the sources do not support one. The rule is to name who is there, in the terms they use, not to apply one frame everywhere.

The standing of those already rooted in a place is a gap in the group's four sovereignty axes, each of which describes the sovereignty of the people arriving. The group has been asked to consider a fifth consideration beside them, host-community standing, as a qualitative dimension and never a score. That is a proposal in the working documents: the group has not yet taken it up, and it changes no decision the group has committed to (F-40, F-44). The concern behind it is a mechanism, stated here as a judgement and not as a measured result: the conditions a settlement tool foregrounds, secure water, a mild climate and a lawful route, are the same conditions that draw buyers with outside income, so the tool's own targets may be one variable with the pressure that raises land prices against local incomes. No displacement figure is printed on this site.

How to arrive well, for people still weighing it, is at How to arrive. For people already in a place, For people already here says what this site says about your place and what it will not do.

Healthy integration. Whether a place welcomes new arrivals, and on what terms, is a matter of trust built across decades. It is not a checkbox a framework can verify. The work of integration sits with the arriving person, in relationship with the people already there.

Land stewardship. Stewardship as relationship over time, not transaction. Buying land is the easy part; becoming responsible to it over decades is the work the framework cannot represent in a data layer.

The framework is one input among many, most of which live not in datasets but in conversations with the people who already know a place. These values are how the project keeps that conversation honest: the tool exists to help a community arrive in reciprocity and give back to a place over generations — and where it cannot be used that way, it should not be used.

The slate now covers thirty regions, fifteen in Europe and fifteen in North America. Alentejo, West Cork / Connemara and Transylvania (explored in depth above) anchored the first European cut, and North America extends the framework to a second continent, from the arid Southwest to the maritime Pacific Northwest, across a far wider catalogue of land-tenure regimes: US fee-simple with agricultural-use zoning, Canadian agricultural-land reserves, Québec civil law and CPTAQ farmland protection, and Mexican ejido communal title. Regions were added by a slate-admission rule: a region is admitted only with complete sourced values, or an honest gap with its reason, and a Land standing entry checked against opened public sources; a region that could not meet it was dropped, never shipped half-done. The slate itself remains a proposal pending the working group's sign-off, and the group has not yet reviewed how it grew. The current regions are listed on the home page, in no meaningful order.

One story about versions. V1, as the working documents define it, is data ingestion, and the group's V1 shipping proposal awaits ratification. This site is a designed demonstration beside it, not V1. V2, meaning automated querying against a live pipeline, practitioner-set thresholds against live data and any weighting, has not started. A serious V2 would ingest WorldClim CMIP6, WRI Aqueduct, SoilGrids and the regional cadastres on a scheduled cadence and surface per-cell source and vintage in the interface; that is months of work for a small team, not a single-person sprint.

The framework was originated by Askja and is developed by a small working group of practitioners and researchers. The demonstration site was built by one member of that group, who holds the practitioner seat. Members are named by first name and role only, as in the working documents; no surnames, handles or contact details appear anywhere on the site. There is no public contact route yet; the working group will set one. The group's invitation, a PDF that explains the working group, the roles and how its documents travel, is public; the working documents themselves are the group's own and are not published here. Open data sources; no commercial product.

Further regional case studies, a fourth and a fifth, will be drafted as time allows, and the page will grow with the work.