Seeds of the future – insights from this year’s UnConference

On Friday 19 September 2025, the Sustainability Accelerator hosted our fourth annual UnConference, bringing together over 80 movers and shakers from across sectors to discuss how to operate and collaborate in our world in flux.

2025 has been a year of contrasts in the journey towards sustainable futures. Climate impacts are already reshaping the systems that organise how we live, with rising seas, extreme heat, and natural disasters testing economies, exposing the limits of international governance and finance. At the same time, new collaborations and ideas are emerging to meet the challenge, revitalising our ways of living: for example, this year, renewables overtook coal as the world’s largest electricity source, and are projected to for the first time cause the decline of China’s CO2 emissions.

Against this backdrop, the UnConference explored how this moment presents unique challenges and opportunities for leaders, who are experimenting with new methods for working together to build sustainable futures. Here's three themes that emerged from our day of dialogue.

Many sectors are beginning to grapple with collapse risk, and exploring the dynamics of this was a key theme of the day. Financial institutions are coming to terms with the extent to which climate shocks will devalue their assets, threatening the very foundations of their business models. The crisis is particularly acute in the insurance sector, with large parts of the world rendered uninsurable due to extreme weather. There will be spill over effects as costs rise, reinsurers pull back, and every actor along the gamut, from large insurance companies to frontline communities, is left less secure.

As awareness of collapse risk begins to spread, different parts of the ecosystem are wrestling with it in different ways, and this was reflected on the day. Businesses framed the issue through financial exposure, systemic risk and transition plans, while community groups considered the human-level impacts of sectoral collapse, and changed policies. The high-level discussions of industry collapse were rich in technical detail, and now need to advance to better integrate these human-level considerations. These conversations mirrored the gap between technocratic decision-making and everyday lived realities, which has been growing for decades. As a result, public trust is eroding as policies and sectors reshape peoples’ lives, without including their voices.

At the Sustainability Accelerator, we’re asking: What is gained and lost when GDP and revenue are used as the main proxy to articulate collapse risk? How might new combinations of technocratic and community-level discussions of collapse lead to more ambitious and effective responses?

As participants moved from diagnosing risks to evaluating responses, this year saw a growing emphasis on the need to re-engage with the natural world and reimagine our relationship to land, ecology, and living within our planetary limits. Many participants spoke about the need to move from extraction and consumption towards reciprocity and restoration, underlining how forging a liveable, sustainable future depends on repairing our bond with nature.

One concept that generated a lot of enthusiasm on the day was rematriation: an approach which emphasises returning to indigenous, custodial practices, that emphasise local knowledge, and respecting Mother Earth. Though indigenous practices are often ignored by the orthodoxy, they are not distant history. Many communities live by these sensible, implementable principles today: from the ancient Mayan milpa intercropping systems still used in Mexico, to Aboriginal land management through fire burning in Australia. Participants sparked ideas about how they could apply the lens of rematriation to their work, centring care and ecology in decision making.

These conversations were in the vein of the Sustainability Accelerator’s recent work, which explores how regenerative design and bioeconomies are kickstarting new models of production and governance, that embed nature meaningfully. Even within the corporate and financial world, nature is beginning to re-enter the conversation through mechanisms like debt-for-nature swaps and nature-based finance. These shifts are small, but demonstrate the rich and complex ways that considerations of nature are increasingly embedded in a wide range of decision-making settings.

At the Sustainability Accelerator, we’re asking: How can we better integrate nature-centric practices within current institutions? And how does decision-making change when we do so?

Given the events of recent years, it is no surprise that the rise of anti-climate and authoritarian politics were large in peoples’ minds. Importantly, participants explored how to respond in ways that could advance the transition: borrowing from the useful aspects of populist thought – the emotional resonance, immediacy, and connection to place – while rejecting division. The recent election of Zack Polanski as the leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, sparked discussion of his green populist agenda, which frames current policy dilemmas as a struggle between everyday people and wealthy, polluting elites, and posits a just transition as a tool to combat the cost-of-living crisis.

People discussed how advocates could leverage existing progress on renewable energy and biodiversity to build an inclusive ‘us’ around shared connection to environment, and experience of climate shocks, as a foundation from which to launch structural green change. One participant referenced Climate Outreach’s recent finding from the Britain Talks Climate and Nature study: 80% of people in the UK, across party lines, feel proud of our national environmental protection policies. This example is real evidence of how the transition to a sustainable future is already laying the foundations for new shared identities and narratives. Through collaboration, we can all play a crucial role in helping them to flourish.

At the Sustainability Accelerator, we’re asking: What structures of collaboration are needed for our new era? What lessons can we draw from populist mobilisation to create inclusive coalitions that deliver a sustainable future?

UnConference plays a crucial role in shaping the agenda for the Sustainability Accelerator’s programmes. Reflections on the key themes of our 2024 UnConference played a vital role in helping to shape our new research cycle, The Rift, exploring how societies and institutions navigate a deepening climate crisis. In a similar way, the themes of this year’s UnConference are already sparking thoughts about priority research topics for the second phase of The Rift.

A big thank you to everyone who was a part of it, we hope you found it inspiring. We know that we’ve left filled with ideas and inspiration of how to help others navigate this moment – drawing on better models and tools, forming new coalitions and notions of creative governance, and most of all, collaborating across borders and boundaries will be vital to the years ahead. Follow our research and get in touch to join the conversation!