Version 4.1 · 30 August 2026

The Portuguese version of this document is the binding version.

What We Do, In One Sentence

Terra Agora Foundation takes ownership of land that matters and holds it in permanence, so that it can be entrusted to the care of local Guardians, with independent governance and care rooted in the place. The first Contrato Guardião, for Idanha-à-Vida, is in preparation.

The Foundation is being built. The model and the governance are settled; the monitoring and reporting capacity is being built in stages and reaches full operation during the course of 2027.

What Is in Front of Boards Now

The obligation shrank; the exposure did not

The reporting perimeter narrowed in 2026. Under the Omnibus I directive, agreed in February 2026, the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive now applies to companies with more than 1,000 employees and more than €450 million in net turnover, for financial years starting on or after 1 January 2027. Listed small and medium sized companies left the scope altogether. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive now reaches companies above 5,000 employees and €1.5 billion in turnover, with compliance required from 26 July 2029, and the obligation to adopt a climate transition plan was removed.

Many companies that spent three years preparing are now outside the perimeter, or inside it later. The question that follows is the one worth putting to a board: what remains worth doing once the requirement to do it has gone away.

What did not narrow is the exposure. In Portugal that means water, fire, soil, and the viability of the rural areas where sites, suppliers and workforce sit. Meanwhile the Nature Restoration Regulation moves the other way: draft national restoration plans are due to the Commission in September 2026, with adoption in 2027, and the Portuguese plan was in public consultation in August 2026. Land based restoration is becoming a national programme with targets attached, and companies that hold land are inside that picture whether they engage with it or not.

Why This Matters for Companies in Portugal

Even when carbon sequestration and offsets are excluded

Portugal faces converging risks that directly affect business continuity: water stress, wildfire, soil degradation, rural decline and biodiversity loss. These are systemic risks, not reputational ones, and they are resolved at the level of the land systems and the communities that depend on them, over long periods.

Terra Agora Foundation addresses these risks by stabilising the ownership of the land systems on which the economy ultimately depends, without requiring companies to own land or to run projects.

If Your Company Owns Land

Including the ground a building or a factory stands on

Companies hold land that does very little on the balance sheet. Buffer strips, catchment, scrub, the ground around a plant, sometimes the ground the plant itself stands on. It is carried at a low value, it produces nothing, and in Portugal it increasingly carries obligations: fuel management, liability in the event of fire, and the cost of doing nothing.

There is an arrangement for that land, and it does not require the company to stop using it.

The company donates the land to the Foundation. The Foundation takes ownership and the land can no longer be sold. The buildings, the plant and the operation stay with the company, under a Direito de Superfície, the instrument in Portuguese law that separates ownership of the ground from ownership of what stands on it. Production continues. What changes is that the ground beneath it is permanently protected, and no future decision can reverse that.

Care of the land is arranged case by case. The company may become a Guardian Entity, going through the same designation process as any other, with the Learning Pathway as a condition. Or care may sit with a third party, under a comodato or another instrument suited to the situation. The Foundation does not impose a single route.

The point is not the transfer of a valuable asset. The land is often worth little, and the Foundation says so plainly. The point is that a company can state, and mean, that the land it operates on is permanently protected, and can set out in its own words the long term vision for how that land, and the community around it, are to be cared for.

A Commitment the Next Board Cannot Undo

Any environmental commitment a board makes can be unmade. Targets are revised, programmes are cut in a bad year, and a change of ownership resets everything. Boards know this, which is why the people reading those commitments discount them.

Ownership does not work that way. Once land passes to the Foundation it can no longer be sold, and the protection does not depend on the company’s continued goodwill, its budget cycle, or who runs it in fifteen years. The commitment outlives the people who made it, which is the only condition under which a statement about land is worth anything.

Independent Monitoring, and What It Costs

The company sets the vision. The Foundation does not write it, does not approve it and does not certify it. What the Foundation does is observe the land against that vision over time, and report what it finds.

This is a paid service, and it is stated as such. Monitoring done properly costs money: field observation, soil, water and biodiversity records, and the work of keeping them comparable from year to year. A monitoring relationship the company had not paid for would be worth less, not more.

Two conditions attach to it. The Foundation reports what it observes, including where the vision is not being met; and the monitoring relationship is kept separate from decisions on the protection of the land, which sit with the Foundation’s governing bodies. The Foundation compiles site level accounts consistent with the SEEA, the system of the UN Statistical Commission. It does not put a monetary value on nature.

This capacity is being built in stages and reaches full operation during the course of 2027.

The Corporate Value Proposition

1. Risk Reduction in Core Operating Contexts

The Terra Agora Foundation model addresses water systems, soils, biodiversity and rural viability upstream of corporate operations. The Foundation holds the land and sets the standards; it is the Guardian Entities that care for the land.

Value: reduced exposure to supply chain disruption, fire risk and community instability, without operational burden.

2. An ESG Contribution Grounded in Real Assets

Terra Agora Foundation concentrates on verifiable, place based outcomes:

• ecological integrity
• social cohesion
• long term care of the land

Value: ESG substance grounded in real assets and independent governance. The verification and reporting capacity is being built in stages.

3. Where EU Regulation Is Actually Going

The reporting perimeter narrowed in 2026, but the direction of travel on nature and land did not. The Nature Restoration Regulation sets binding restoration objectives, with national plans due in September 2026 and adoption in 2027. Nature dependencies, ecosystem resilience and long term care of the land are the substance that survives the simplification.

Value: a position that holds whether or not the company is in scope of the reporting rules, and that does not have to be rebuilt when those rules change again.

4. Reputational Depth Through Care of the Land, Not Sponsorship

Terra Agora Foundation explicitly prevents:

• naming rights over land
• influence by Patrons or companies on land use
• branding capture

Value: reputation built on seriousness, restraint and credibility, qualities increasingly valued by regulators, talent and society.

5. Meaningful Employee Engagement

Terra Agora Foundation plans to offer, once the first Contrato Guardião is in place:

• learning journeys into regenerative landscapes
• leadership development around systems thinking and care of the land
• long term relationships with places

Value: purpose and engagement grounded in a long relationship with a place.

6. Contribution to National Resilience

Terra Agora Foundation addresses issues Portugal must solve anyway: land fragmentation, wildfire risk, rural abandonment and ecosystem decline.

Value: a stronger social licence to operate, through contribution to infrastructure of public benefit.

How It Works

• Land is secured in perpetuity: it is placed into the Foundation so that it cannot be sold or fragmented.
• Capital enters a governed structure, through flexible support routes or funds with a defined purpose.
• Local Guardians care for the land, under long term contracts linking care to outcomes; the first Contrato Guardião is in preparation.
• Independent governance ensures accountability: ecological, social and financial oversight across time.

Tax Status, Stated Plainly

What the Foundation can and cannot offer today

Terra Agora Foundation does not hold utilidade pública status, the Portuguese public benefit status. It is a recent foundation, access to that status depends on conditions not yet met, and we do not expect to hold it for some years yet.

There is a second route: the environmental patronage status under artigo 62.º of the Estatuto dos Benefícios Fiscais, which requires a joint decision by the members of Government responsible for finance and for the environment. The Foundation is preparing the application and does not expect a formal decision before 2027.

Until that decision exists, no donation to the Foundation carries a fiscal advantage, and nothing in this document should be read as suggesting one. We would rather say so at the outset than leave the question open.

What a company gains in the meantime is not fiscal. It is land that cannot be sold, a real asset whose condition can be verified on the ground, and a long relationship with work that is being built now. Support at this stage determines what becomes possible: which land comes in, how quickly, and how securely. Governance stays independent of any funder, and that independence is what makes the work worth supporting.

What the Structure Is Built to Do

• hold the Strategic Assets in permanence
• keep governance independent of any funder
• account clearly for ecological, social and cultural outcomes

A loss of natural capital in the Strategic Assets is not compensable by financial gain.

The Core Message

Terra Agora Foundation allows companies to strengthen the ecological and social foundations of Portugal by supporting land held in permanence and cared for by Guardians, with independent governance and without operational complexity for the company.

Invitation

If you represent a company interested in talking about this model, the invitation is to begin with a conversation.

Terra Agora Foundation