Harnessing digital innovation to measure what matters in regenerative landscape projects
The CBA’s AI Fellow Rafael Camargo reflects on the AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge
What happens when regenerative landscape practitioners, technologists, and data experts come together to rethink how impact is measured? From 13–15 January 2026, the CBA joined the AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge in London to explore exactly that. The hackathon brought together more than 500 participants across 49 teams and 20 charities, creating a fast-paced environment for experimentation with emerging digital tools, particularly generative AI, in service of real-world social and environmental challenges.
For the CBA, the focus was a fundamental barrier to scaling regenerative landscapes: fragmented and inconsistent monitoring and evaluation (M&E) data. Across regenerative agriculture, ecological restoration, and other nature-based solutions, projects often track outcomes using different indicators, methods, and systems. While this reflects local needs and constraints, it makes it difficult to compare results, demonstrate impact to stakeholders, ensure accountability, or systematically learn what works best across contexts. Addressing this challenge is central to CBA’s mission to accelerate regenerative approaches globally.
CBA’s work is guided by its seven Principles for Regenerative Landscapes, grounded in strong sustainability, social-ecological resilience, and the recognition of local context as the foundation for landscape regeneration. Translating these principles into practical, consistent, and affordable metrics, however, remains complex. During the hackathon, the CBA invited participants to explore how a shared digital foundation could support a more unified M&E approach, helping project teams identify relevant indicators suited to their local realities, while enabling data to be consolidated in ways that strengthen learning and accountability across projects and geographies. This challenge built directly on CBA’s ongoing work, in collaboration with Nature-based Insights, to develop its M&E framework and accompanying handbook.
In the spirit of learning through exploration, CBA led two teams in a friendly internal competition, testing different ways generative AI might support the democratisation of CBA’s research data, make the identification of appropriate evaluation metrics faster and more accessible, and improve data structuring and knowledge sharing, e.g., solutions such as a CBA-expert chatbot, a Project Design Description auto-screener, an app for data ingestion for non-data engineers. The emphasis was not on producing finished solutions, but on stress-testing ideas, surfacing opportunities, and better understanding where digital tools can meaningfully reduce complexity, and where local knowledge and scientific rigour must remain central.
The hackathon also underscored the value of dialogue between the sustainability and technology communities. A recorded conversation between Talia Smith, CBA’s Chief Programmes Officer, and Jose Gordon, Head of AWS Global Impact, reflects on how cloud computing and AI can be responsibly applied to support regenerative outcomes when guided by clear principles, thoughtful design, and strong partnerships.
While the AWS Breaking Barriers Challenge was an experiment rather than an endpoint, it generated valuable insights that will inform the next phase of CBA’s work on monitoring, evaluation, and learning. As CBA continues to refine its M&E framework and support regenerative landscapes worldwide, these explorations help clarify how digital innovation can strengthen, rather than complicate, efforts to measure what matters, learn across projects, and ultimately scale regenerative impact.
