The Brazilian news portal Terra has published a profile of Gaya Herrington of Cascadia BioFi, as part of its coverage of the Encontro Futuro Vivo, a sustainability event hosted in São Paulo by the telecommunications company Vivo. Herrington will be a featured guest. The article, “Gaya Herrington, a cientista que revisitou uma previsão de 50 anos atrás sobre os limites do planeta”, appeared on August 6, 2026. It is in Portuguese; the title translates roughly as “Gaya Herrington, the scientist who revisited a 50-year-old forecast about the planet’s limits.”
A forecast revisited
Terra introduces Herrington as a Dutch economist and researcher who became known around the world in 2021 with her study Update to the Limits to Growth. The study compared recent data with the scenarios in The Limits to Growth, the 1972 report to the Club of Rome. According to the profile, she found that humanity’s trajectory remains close to the most alarming scenarios in the original study. Terra also stresses her caveat: the result is a warning about the need to change the economic model, not a prediction of inevitable collapse.
A well-being economy, and a bioregional one
The profile describes the center of her work as the well-being economy, an approach that replaces growth as the main goal of public policy with measures of quality of life and the health of ecosystems. In Terra’s account, she sees the economy as a social construction that sits inside society, which in turn depends on nature.
Terra also calls her one of the leading advocates of bioregionalism, which it explains as a movement that encourages communities to organize their economic activity around the limits and character of local ecosystems. It notes her role as co-director of bioregional finance for Cascadia, where she works on financial mechanisms that fund regenerative projects. That is the work of Cascadia BioFi.
Background
The profile adds that she studied mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and macroeconomics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and holds a master’s degree in sustainability from Harvard University, where Terra reports she joins the faculty as an adjunct professor this September. It also notes that she serves on the boards of organizations including r3.0 and the Post Carbon Institute and is a member of the Club of Rome.
We are grateful to Terra for the profile and glad to see the case for bioregional finance reach readers in Brazil.
Read the profile at Terra (in Portuguese).
Photo by Núcleo Editorial, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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