Name: Ulrico Grech-Cumbo
Location: South Africa
Initiative Title: The FutureZoo
Short Description of Initiative: Reinventing environmental education for a modern world.
Sectors: Education, Conservation, Tech
Website: www.zooofthefuture.org; www.habitatxr.com
Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulricogc/
Ulrico Grech-Cumbo is a South African conservationist, technologist, and entrepreneur. With over 20 years in media, he founded Habitat XR in 2016 to explore how immersive tech like VR and holograms can transform our relationship with nature. This led to the Habitat Nature Parks Foundation, which uses empathy-driven experiences to reinvent environmental education.
His award-winning immersive projects have earned him recognition from Fast Company and South Africa’s 40 Under 40 in Technology. The Foundation’s flagship, The FutureZoo, addresses disconnection from nature and the shortcomings of traditional zoos by using immersive tech to foster environmental empathy at scale.
In this conversation, Ulrico shares his vision for empathy-led conservation, challenges cultural myths about nature, and explores how tech can reconnect us to the wild. At the heart of his work lies a radical question: What if the most powerful force in conservation isn’t protection, but connection?
I’d been working with these storytelling technologies (virtual reality and the like) for a few years. We’d had a few great, but relatively isolated wins, such as helping conservation NGOs fundraise record amounts of money at their galas.
One night, during a post-conservation conference retreat, I was sitting around a campfire in the middle of Akagera National Park with some other delegates. As I explained what we did, someone said, “So this is kind of like a digital Noah’s Ark? Then everyone in the world could experience nature.”
It happened at a time when I was searching for an answer to the question, “How do we truly maximise the impact of our work?” I had never considered a use case of these technologies at scale. That night, I decided to seriously pursue this. Not long after, our own Foundation was registered, and I haven’t given up since. That night was the lightbulb moment for me.
Our natural world is in crisis, quite simply because of the lack of care humans have for all other life on this planet. It’s called wilful ignorance. Living in cities, which have themselves displaced nature, perpetuates our lack of connection.
We have found and built vast experience in new, highly efficient ways of making people care more about nature. And it is totally possible to do it at scale. If we don’t fix this toxic relationship we have with our natural world and all the other living beings we share this rock with, we will irreversibly degrade our own life support system.
“You don’t protect it unless you love it, and you don’t love it until you witness it,” right? The traditional way for urban populations to experience wildlife, nature, and environmental education en masse is through zoos, aquariums, and natural history museums. But it’s a 200-year-old ideology—one that has been proven to be extremely ineffective at changing the way that humans think and behave. Then there is the ethical question of captivity.
We fully support the idea of democratisation of wildlife for all, but we are challenging the belief that captivity is the best tool to achieve it in a modern day and age.
We are also challenging certain perceptions that ‘technology’ and ‘connection to nature’ are diametrically opposed ideas. Technology can actually foster incredibly meaningful connections in a way that was previously impossible just a few years ago. And it gets better and better all the time.
The relationship lacks vital empathy. There is a widely held cultural ideology: “Humans are simply superior beings, and we should have dominion over nature.” We are levelling the playing field to invoke a change in this deeply problematic belief system—one where we are all interconnected: the health of ecosystems, the health of wild animals, and the health of humans are all inextricably linked.
We work with the currency of empathy—and in particular, a form of empathy called “Inclusion in Nature of Self,” which measures the degree to which people believe they are a part of nature, and nature a part of them. By changing mindsets, we also then change behaviours—over time, resulting in more sustainable choices from local micro-settings (at home, in our cities) to the decisions we make in policy and industry.
The first belief was that it’s someone else’s responsibility to do something like this. That night, around the campfire, I had to ask myself, “What if nobody else ever actually does?” That terrified me far more than the terror of trying to build a project this massive.
Another belief that I needed to let go of was that I needed to do this by myself. I’ve let go of that and focused on building an incredible team of people who have a nature-protective mindset at the core of everything they do.
It really does go so much further than awareness. By definition, an immersive experience is one in which suspension of disbelief takes place. Your mind and body experience physiological changes—changes in heart rate, changes in brain chemistry, pupil dilation, goosebumps, and more.
So when done right, the term “virtual experience” becomes a bit of a misnomer—it is, for all intents and purposes, a real human experience. We call this “telepresence.” Once you are present in the savannah, amongst a herd of wild elephants, you feel a deep, intimate connection. This moment unfolds around you in real time, and you are an active participant in it.
This is something that traditional media cannot achieve—it is very different from watching a Netflix documentary, where you are very much on the outside of the story, looking in.In many ways, these types of experiences can’t even realistically be replicated in the real wild (at least not safely!). So they serve a purpose of almost embodying an animal, or a place, or a threat, and understanding things from a very different, and unprecedented, perspective. This is why our decade-plus work in this field has been so powerful.
It has been significantly challenging to fundraise for what I consider to be an incredibly obvious idea. I’ve been shocked at how many people, particularly funders, don’t seem to get it. A lot of money is being routed to efforts like anti-poaching, and while that is important, I have the impression that we should be doing more to rectify the human-environment culture problem.The problem that actually causes most of the need for last-line-of-defence conservation in the first place.
It’s hard for Innovators to stop or take a break when there is this deep sense of urgency to fix things we think are broken.
I once asked Dr. Sylvia Earle how she keeps going, and she answered, “If a baby is falling from an apartment window, would you just stand idly by?” Innovators derive joy and fulfilment from addressing these tough problems. So there is a very high propensity to ignore the need to recover, leading to burnout.
There is also a lot of climate fatigue, as nature innovators sit at the proverbial coalface of what can sometimes be pretty traumatising stuff. Without adequate tools, which most don’t have, this all has a hugely negative effect on the quality of life, efficiency of output, mental health, as well as professional and personal relationships.
It’s deeply ironic that working hard to do what’s right can come at such a huge cost. Innovators need good, easy, effective tools to maintain mental well-being and physical health while solving what needs to be solved.
The FutureZoo’s are established in multiple major cities around the world, with millions of annual visitors. The blueprint that once lay as an outlier becomes the new normal for how humans learn to care not just about nature and wildlife, but the complex environmental challenges that must be overcome in the next generation or two.
In the children leaving these facilities, we have lit a spark for change in thinking and action. It sets them on a path toward a deeper integration of nature and self. They influence others. They grow up to become captains of industry and presidents, making better, more encompassing, and caring decisions for nature that allow life on earth to thrive.
This insight is part of a series highlighting our first cohort of the Exploration Co-Lab. Read more about the Exploration Co-Lab here.
You can also read more insight pieces like this here.
The content of this piece represents the author’s own views and does not necessarily represent the views of Unearthodox or of any of its collaborating institutions.
