In 2025, we intentionally focused on fostering unexpected connections across disciplines, sectors, and worldviews. Through curated juries, open calls, cohort gatherings, alternative convenings, and global dialogues, we brought together Indigenous leaders and AI researchers; biomimicry educators and legal innovators; systems investors and community practitioners; futurists and mainstream conservation organisations. We designed relational spaces to cultivate trust, curiosity, and collaborative inquiry, moving beyond confrontational or transactional relationships.
Earlier this year, we began to see early signals of collaboration emerging from the innovations we nurtured. These were not pre-designed partnerships, but relationships that formed organically through trust, proximity, and shared inquiry, which began to generate new forms of relational shifts and conservation outcomes.
In 2025, Unearthodox’s Exploration Co-Lab demonstrated the power of catalytic incubation by bringing together visionary innovators to address humanity’s disconnection from nature. A standout collaboration between Gal Zanir (Nature Perspectives) and Ulrico Grech-Cumbo (FutureZoo) illustrates how bridging AI, immersive technology, and conservation can unlock new pathways for impact. Through the Co-Lab’s ecosystem of mentorship and experimentation, their complementary approaches, which give nature both a ‘voice’ and a ‘presence’, culminated in Imbali, a groundbreaking, AI-driven holographic experience showcased at Davos. This work exemplifies Unearthodox’s role in convening bold thinkers, fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration, and accelerating regenerative ideas onto the global stage.
In 2025, Unearthodox strengthened thought leadership and visibility by engaging in high-level international forums that brought together key representatives from the wider innovation, investment, nature, and future ecosystems. These engagements reinforced our role as a trusted voice and partner.
Throughout the year, we delivered carefully curated sessions and workshops at key international fora, including InTent at Davos, the Skoll World Forum week in Oxford, the St. Gallen Symposium and the TPC/NO.17 Foundation Impact Week in Singapore.
As part of the AT ONE IMPACT WEEK 2025, Unearthodox CEO Melanie Ryan joined a high-level Impact Forum session facilitated by the World Economic Forum, contributing to a systems dialogue on shifting from extractive to regenerative economic models. Emphasising a ‘plural value’ paradigm, she called for a redefinition of capital beyond financial metrics to include social, cultural, natural, and relational dimensions. The session contributed to positioning Unearthodox as a catalyst for advancing bold, unconventional innovations that enable systemic transformation toward regenerative futures.
We also contributed to high-visibility convenings on nature conservation, sharing research findings to spark dialogue and reflection, such as at the IUCN World Conservation Congress 2025 under the theme Shaping resilience, scaling impact. In parallel, we facilitated alternative gatherings exploring how nature futures are shaped, including experimental formats like the AI for Good Summit Unconference, A Salon for the Soul of AI. We also participated as delegates in a range of strategic events – including the Dubai Future Forum 2025, Social Innovation Summit, Impact Europe Week 2025, and SwissFoundations Symposium 2025 – helping position Unearthodox as an emerging thought leader and a credible new voice in the field. Wherever possible, we used these platforms to offer visibility and amplify the work of our network of partners and innovators.
The search for incubation partners became an important learning journey in itself. We intentionally sought collaborators to co-create an incubation experience aligned with the regenerative principles at the heart of our work. In 2025, we engaged with more than 50 alternative incubators from around the world, deepening our understanding of what regenerative incubation can look like in practice. This process ultimately brought together a strong and values-aligned team of incubation partners who are already enriching the work in meaningful ways.
In 2025, we began shaping the acceleration phase planned for 2026. This required a careful balancing of our regenerative ethos with the need to deliver tangible value for both innovators and society. The insights and learnings emerging from this process are already informing other areas of our work, particularly the Exploration Co-Lab.
Throughout 2025, we engaged in a diverse range of global convenings at the intersection of social innovation, systems change, and regeneration. These events are part of an ongoing effort to build relationships, exchange knowledge, and catalyse collective action. The map below traces where we showed up, and how we contributed to weaving connections for change.
The Regenerative Futures Programme continued to evolve in 2025, creating a space for exchange, reflection, and shared ambition. Its strength lies in the diversity of people, networks, and organisations it brings into conversation: from Anthology contributors, practitioners, and thought leaders, to the Advisory Group, jury members, and innovators. Together, they reflect a growing collective appetite to advance regenerative approaches, while highlighting Unearthodox’s role in convening, connecting, and stewarding this emerging field.
Originally launched in 2024 to explore how regenerative approaches can make conservation more impactful, inclusive, and equitable, the programme has now moved from reframing to action, laying the groundwork for the incubation and acceleration phases planned for 2026.
Urgency & Deep Time
Responding to urgent crises while ensuring actions are rooted in the ancestral wisdom of the place and its people, honouring the generations before and after us.
Context:
Climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequalities demand immediate action, but regenerative approaches involve deep, intentional healing that takes time.
Invitation:
How might we design for flexibility, responsiveness, and growth without becoming chaotic or incoherent? How might we let something new emerge without forcing it into pre-existing boxes? Where is the structure needed for safety, and where can you leave room for emergence?
Balancing personal responsibility and inner healing with deep structural shifts. Ensuring the burden does not fall on the individual alone, but working collectively so that systems, institutions, and structures also evolve.
Context:
Neoliberal approaches often place the responsibility of change on individuals, while systems (policy, economy, governance) often remain unchanged.
Invitation:
Where should innovation begin - with individual transformation, cultural shifts, or structural change? And how do these levels speak to each other? How might our work avoid placing disproportionate burden on individuals, while still cultivating agency, accountability, and collective momentum?
Technology is but a tool and cannot replace the care, trust and relationships that bind living systems.
Context:
Technological interventions are easily measurable and scalable, while relationships based on care and trust are harder to ‘quantify’.
Invitation:
How can we ensure that technological solutions are also guided by relational wisdom and not just efficiency or scale? Who and what is held sacred in the design process? How can innovation improve relationships rather than replace or instrumentalise them?
A bold, honest act and not a shinier version of the extractive system that maintains the status quo.
Context:
Regenerative approaches often get absorbed and aligned into the very structures they are trying to shift.
Invitation:
How might we protect truly regenerative vision from becoming a more ‘sustainable’ version of harm? How might we root truly radical change in care rather than spectacle?
Honouring ancestral and place-based wisdoms while navigating the existing and deeply embedded colonial structures and institutional realities.
Context:
Regenerative and Indigenous ways of knowing often challenge dominant, institutional logics about funding, metrics, and legitimacy.
Invitation:
How might we ensure that regenerative innovation navigates institutional terrain without being captured by it? In what ways could it hold space for ancestral, land-based, or community-rooted wisdoms that institutions often cannot see, name, or hold? How might we make room for refusal, for reparation - not just inclusion?
Rooting in place, people, and story - while staying in solidarity with global movements and shared planetary challenges. Protecting local knowledge without isolating it.
Context:
Working at the local level ensures relevance and trust, but can be limited in scale. Global collaborations help spread ideas, but risk overlooking local cultures and ecological needs.
Invitation:
How might regenerative innovation stay rooted in the specific needs and histories of a place - while also being in dialogue with broader systems of learning and solidarity? How might we protect the sovereignty of the local while honouring the relational nature of global engagements?
Shifting from extracting ideas to building with communities and ecosystems. Moving beyond consultation toward shared ownership and mutual learning.
Context:
Knowledge, particularly that passed on through oral traditions and cultural practices, has too often been dismissed as unscientific and unreliable.
Invitation:
How might we co-create this regenerative innovation with communities, ecosystems, and epistemologies that are often excluded from formal knowledge systems? Who is involved not just in testing or feedback, but in imagining and shaping the very foundations of the innovation? What forms of reciprocity can we build in?
Staying open to the unexpected and new while ensuring trust, accountability, and momentum.
Context:
Project timelines often push for structure, deliverables and seek control. Regeneration invites us to be comfortable with uncertainty and allow space for the unknown to emerge.
Invitation:
How might we design for flexibility, responsiveness, and growth without becoming chaotic or incoherent? What if we let something new emerge without forcing it into pre-existing boxes? Where should we include structure needed for safety, and where can we leave room for surprise?
