Sitemap

The Day We Decided to Measure Aliveness

At SEVA¹ , we stopped asking how to count impact. We started listening for life.

4 min readSep 26, 2025

--

Press enter or click to view image in full size

In the old world, we measured things.

We measured tons of carbon. We measured hectares reforested. We measured impact through static indicators, lifted from living contexts and filed into spreadsheets.

But none of it felt alive.

At SEVA, we’ve been building a bridge between nature and finance. A new architecture — not metaphorical, but measurable. Our work began with a familiar question:

How do we measure impact?

But the answers we encountered were partial. Atomized. We saw metrics that carved life into fragments: carbon baselines, biodiversity counts, SDG checkboxes. Useful, yes. But insufficient.

They were describing the pulse. But they weren’t listening for it.

Our Aha Moment: Life is Not a Snapshot

Then came the shift. A reorientation. An aha.

The question changed.

Not “how do we measure what is?” but:

How do we measure the capacity of a system to generate more life?

--

--

Ernesto van Peborgh
Ernesto van Peborgh

Written by Ernesto van Peborgh

Entrepreneur, writer, filmmaker, Harvard MBA. Builder of systemic interactive networks for knowledge management.

No responses yet