Insurance pays after something breaks. Land pays before, during, and after — every year, whether the world is on fire or not.
That is the simple idea behind "land as insurance," a phrase the permaculture designer Rob Avis has been writing about since 2016 and revisited again this month on LinkedIn. His point: a well-designed piece of land — water captured, food forest planted, soil building, energy flowing — works like an insurance policy that pays in advance. It produces dividends in food, water, and stability while also rising in value. No term life policy does that. No bond ladder comes close.
We have been building the same intuition from a different direction. For the past several years, the ensurance protocol has been turning land is the policy into a real financial product — instruments anyone can hold, yields that compound, and a path from active stewardship to permanent protection. We call it natural asset ensurance.
before, now, after — three ways to act on risk
Lawyers and economists have a few Latin phrases for when a policy takes effect. The phrases are simple once translated.
| The Latin | In plain words | What it looks like on the land |
|---|---|---|
| ex ante | before it happens | plant trees so the slope holds; light cool fires so the forest doesn't explode; protect the headwaters so the well stays full |
| ex nunc | from now on | once protected, stay protected — every year forward, in perpetuity |
| ex post | after it happens | rebuild the burned town, truck in bottled water, write checks for crop loss, list a species as endangered |
Conventional insurance acts ex post — it writes a check after the loss. Ensurance is built for the other two:
- Lines are ex ante. They fund the people and purpose actively protecting a place. They reduce risk now, in varying degrees, and they can lapse — like any active coverage.
- Policies are ex nunc. From the day they are written, the natural asset is protected, and at the end of the policy term it enters entrust — permanent conservation under real property law.
Insurance and ensurance are not opposed. They stack. Less damage means lower claims, lower premiums, and more land left to insure at all. Ensurance reduces the risk; insurance covers what's left.
The payoff: places under active stewardship are far less likely to burn, dry up, or wash away — and when something does happen, the loss is smaller and the recovery faster.
land, water, fire — early or late
Three forces shape every landscape: land (soil and the life in it), water (the cycle that keeps it all alive), and fire (the force that resets dry country). Each one can be tended early or repaired late. Early is cheaper, slower to set up, and pays back forever. Late is expensive, urgent, and never fully catches up.
land — conservation vs restoration
| Proactive | Reactive |
|---|---|
| Conservation — protect the forest, prairie, or wetland that already works | Restoration — try to rebuild it after the bulldozers leave |
| Save soil that took 500 years to form | Buy fertilizer to replace what eroded in one storm |
| Keep working land working | "Reclaim" a strip mine that will never be the same |
A healthy intact ecosystem is the original infrastructure. Restoration is real and necessary — but always second-best. You can replant trees. You cannot replant 500-year-old soil. You cannot replant 65 million years of co-evolution between a flower and the only insect that pollinates it.
water — protect the headwaters vs ration what's left
| Proactive | Reactive |
|---|---|
| Protect the headwaters — the high forests and meadows where rivers begin | Drought rules — no watering the lawn after July |
| Beaver dams, wet meadows, deep snowpack | Emergency hauling, fish kills, water-rights battles |
| One healthy watershed feeds millions for free | One depleted aquifer costs billions to replace — if it can be replaced at all |
Every glass of clean water came from land that filtered it for free. The cheapest water utility in the world is an intact forest. The most expensive one is the desalination plant built after that forest is gone.
fire — cultural fire vs industrial response
| Proactive | Reactive |
|---|---|
| Cultural burning — small, cool, frequent fires Indigenous people have set for 65,000+ years | Suppression — air tankers, evacuations, megafires |
| Forest stays open, soil stays alive, animals come back | Forest explodes, soil sterilized, towns evacuated |
| Cost: a crew, a cool day, and inherited knowledge | Cost: billions per fire season, and rising |
For a century the official policy was put every fire out. The result is what we have now: forests choked with fuel, then erased in an afternoon. Cultural fire — small, slow, intentional — is the original prevention. It is what most of these landscapes were designed for.
the part nobody can buy back: biodiversity
Here is the hard truth behind every "biodiversity offset" promise:
You cannot offset what took millions of years to make.
A mature wetland is not a pond dug next door. A 300-year-old oak grove is not a row of saplings in a field. A pollinator and the one wildflower it co-evolved with for 40 million years are not replaceable by planting "a flower." When the species is gone, the genetic library it carried — written and edited over deep time — is gone with it.
Offsets treat nature like inventory. Nature is not inventory. It is a one-of-one masterpiece, painted slowly. Once it is scraped off the canvas, no amount of money repaints it.
This is why the only honest answer to biodiversity loss is don't lose it in the first place. Protect the original. Fund the people tending it.
the instruments: real assets, not premiums
This is the move that turns an environmental expense into an environmental investment. Ensurance instruments are assets — with par value, yield, and a place on a balance sheet — not premiums you hope you never get back.
| Instrument | What it is | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Coins | Liquid, tradeable currencies linked to ensurance themes | Broad participation; trading itself routes proceeds to nature |
| Lines (ex ante) | Certificates that fund stewardship across the people and purpose protecting a place | Active risk reduction now; varying degrees of protection |
| Policies (ex nunc) | Certificates tied 1:1 to a specific natural asset with a cooperating owner | Day-one protection that matures into entrust — permanent conservation |
| Agents | Onchain accounts that hold the money and route it | Keep the people doing the work in place |
Every certificate carries a commons share in the protocol — holders participate in the value of the network as a whole, not just their own piece. The flows from healthy land — clean water, stable climate, pollination, flood buffering, soil — show up on the books as yield, not as charity.
A designed property, in Rob's sense, is antifragile — in Nassim Taleb's word, it gets stronger under stress. So is a network of designed properties, funded plurally, with a path to permanence. That is what the protocol assembles.
who already saw this
The land-as-insurance idea did not start with us, or with permaculture, or with finance.
- Indigenous land managers have practiced it for tens of thousands of years — burning, planting, harvesting in ways that made the land more productive over time.
- Rob Avis and the permaculture community (Verge Permaculture, 2016 → 2026) named it for a modern audience. A designed acre out-produces a neglected forty.
- Nassim Taleb gave the systems property a name: antifragile — gains from disorder. A real forest is antifragile. A monoculture cornfield is not.
- Ecological economists (Costanza, Daily, Dasgupta) put real numbers on the services nature provides — and showed that the "free" stuff is worth trillions per year.
We are not inventing the idea. We are giving it the financial plumbing it never had.
the bottom line
The cheapest way to handle the next fire, flood, drought, or extinction is to handle it before — by keeping intact land intact, and by funding the people who already know how. Everything after that is the bill.
Rob's piece makes the case for the family that owns the farm. Ensurance makes the case for everyone else: a school district, a city, an insurer, a foundation, an AI agent, a person who will never set foot on the land but understands that healthy land is the policy underneath every other one.
Pay the premium now, in healthy land. Or pay the claim later, in burned towns, dry wells, and species we will never see again. One of those policies appreciates. The other one only depletes.