The Gaian Effort is a radical ecoterrorist faction that has emerged from the distant and lawless societies of Sol's cometary halo.

The collapse of GTA authority in Sol during the early decades of the Isolation left the system in a state of disorder. While the three major states retained power within their own local space, numerous fringe habitats scattered across the system were left unsupplied and isolated. These included gas mining platforms, terraforming infrastructure deep in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, and the fringe colonies of political radicals. Tens of thousands of souls lived in the fringes of the system, drawn by the cometary industry that was in turn fed by terraforming projects on Mars.

The need for supplies, maintenance, and protection became critical. Into this gap stepped the militaristic followers of the Reverend Iain McDuff: the Gaian Effort. After the collapse of the Socialist Party for a Green Mars following the disastrous elections and riots of 2259, many members of the movement had followed the Reverend into self-imposed exile. In the subsequent years, the Gaian Effort had constructed habitats deep in the Kuiper Belt, using both conventional platform designs and cometary hollows. Although it had gradually fragmented into numerous tribal factions, each one confined to a single habitat, the Effort maintained a militia and sizable deep-space industry. This industry now allowed the Effort to protect and nurture the fractured Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud habitats.

The Gaian Effort shepherded the fringe colonies through the Isolation, gaining the loyalty of many. Once the Ubuntu Party's rise to power ended the system-wide state of emergency, the Fringe Alliance disintegrated, but many of its constituents chose to remain with the Gaian Effort. The Gaian Effort, or GEFs, retain significant manufacturing ability, and to this day they continue to pursue a program of decentralized warfare and terrorism against the Federation.

The failure of a desalinization plant on Europa and the subsequent partial die-off of the moon's native species galvanized support for the Gaian Effort's radical ecoterrorist agenda. GEF ideology is a convergence of hardline environmentalism and transhumanist thought. GEF doctrine maintains that, because the amino acids that triggered the evolution of life on Earth probably originated in comets, the ultimate destiny of mankind is to abandon the parasitic colonization of worlds and return to cometary homes. The GEFs seek to become a liberated Cometary Man, nomadic and free to wander between the stars in habitats carved from the rich ice of Kuiper Belt bodies. The GEFS condemn all human habitation of planets as an unnecessary and destructive crime, and they have backed this rhetoric with violent action.

Intelligence believes that the virulent, militaristic form of this ideology is not universally present in all Gaian Effort habitats, but that the socioeconomic disparity between the Effort and the Federation fuels continued hostilities.

The number of GEF habitats, including total population and military ability, is unknown. GEF society is highly fractured, and individual cells or tribes do not always cooperate.

The past six months have seen a sharp rise in Gaian Effort actions against the already embattled Federation. Intelligence is investigating.