Question 1

Walking Japan's sacred landscapes - An Earth Day reflection

Accepted Answer

Every April 22nd, the world pauses to reflect on the state of our planet. This year, I want to share something different: a life-changing journey in Japan.

Over 15 days this spring, our family walked nearly 300 km through Japan during cherry blossom season: through the electric streets and ancient parks of Tokyo, Nikko&#8217;s UNESCO forest shrines, the lakeside paths of Hakone, Kyoto&#8217;s sacred groves and river valleys, and finally the Kumano Kodo, one of only two UNESCO-designated pilgrimage trails in the world alongside the Camino de Santiago. The trip was a constant and exhilarating movement between Japan&#8217;s dazzling modernity and its deep natural heritage; and it was probably the most walking we have ever done as a family in one trip. This time we didn&#8217;t travel alone, as close friends and other family members joined us for various parts of the journey, making it all the more memorable.

This essay focuses on the natural side of that journey: the forests, groves, valleys and trails that form the heart of what Japan truly is. Japan is a country that covers nearly 70% of its land in forest, a result of geography, careful management, and something less easily measured: a spiritual tradition that has consecrated nature for over two thousand years. Shintoism and Buddhism, two living faiths practiced today in some of the world&#8217;s most beautiful natural settings, have made Japan&#8217;s sacred groves, the chinju no mori, untouchable in ways that no policy alone could achieve.

That lesson matters far beyond Japan. Because if we look carefully across traditions, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, indigenous, and many others, and even among the non-religious, we find the same instinct: nature is sacred, and what is sacred must be protected. On Earth Day, that convergence feels like the most important message of all. We do not share the same traditions. But we share the same home. And across every tradition and conscience, that home is holy.

The torii gate of Hakone Shrine on Lake Ashi, with Mount Fuji hiding behind the mist

Tokyo, Nikko and Hakone

Tokyo is perhaps the world&#8217;s largest urban agglomeration, yet it weaves an impressive network of parks, gardens and sacred groves into its urban fabric: small but vital pockets of nature that offer daily escape to its residents. Beyond the adventures our kids had eagerly anticipated, the 7-Eleven egg sandwiches and the arcades of Akihabara, we spent our days exploring temples, shrines, historic gardens and green spaces woven throughout the city.

Two nature highlights stood out. The first was walking through the Meiji Jingu Shrine, dedicated to Emperor Meiji, the emperor of the Meiji Restoration who opened Japan to the modern world, and its extraordinary forest: 100,000 trees of 365 species planted a century ago by volunteers from across Japan, designed as a self-renewing sacred woodland at the heart of the city. The second was a picnic with our guide Setsuko at Shinjuku Gyoen, one of Tokyo&#8217;s finest botanical gardens, bento boxes from the train station in hand, where cherry blossoms, magnolias and early spring wildflowers were just beginning their spectacular display.

We also explored other beautiful places across the city, including the Imperial Palace and its gardens, and Senso-ji, Tokyo&#8217;s oldest temple, just steps from our Asakusa base, its ancient wooden gate framed by cherry trees just beginning to bloom.

On our fourth day we visited the Nikko UNESCO site and National Park, one of the most memorable of the entire trip. A complex of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples set in an outstanding natural forest, Nikko is inseparable from the legacy of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun who unified Japan and ushered in nearly 250 years of peace, and whose mausoleum rests here among the trees. The entire area is embraced by a magnificent forest of over 13,000 cedar trees, and a famous 37-kilometre avenue of cryptomeria lines the ancient roads connecting Nikko to the outside world, the longest tree-lined avenue on Earth.

After a final day back in Tokyo, we headed to the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park for two days of contrasts: the Hakone loop through the open-air museum, with its remarkable Picasso gallery and sculpture collection, a cable car and one of Japan&#8217;s longest ropeways down to Lake Ashi, and a pirate ship ride to our cabin on the hill, reached by ancient stone paths.

The following morning, we hiked to Hakone Shrine, founded in the 8th century, its buildings nestled in a forest of cedar trees over 800 years old, approached through a series of red arches leading to the famous vermillion torii gate rising from the waters of the lake. That morning, Mount Fuji was hidden behind thick mist &#8211; yet somehow, its energy still permeated the air, the lake, and the ancient cedars around us.

A Grey Heron meditating on a blooming cherry blossom tree on the Kamo River, Kyoto

Kyoto&#8217;s sacred sites and groves

In Kyoto, we based ourselves in a beautiful historic teahouse in the Gojo neighborhood, tucked between the Kamo River and the Takase Canal, a perfectly placed retreat from which to explore on foot. Kyoto is Japan&#8217;s cultural and spiritual heart, and with over 1,600 shrines and temples, every walk led us into a sacred grove.

Our Kyoto chapter opened with a walk along the Philosopher&#8217;s Path, named after Nishida Kitaro, an influential 20th-century philosopher who walked this route daily as a meditative commute to Kyoto University. The two-km stone path follows a cherry-tree-lined canal from Nanzen-ji to Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion (one of Kyoto&#8217;s 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites), where manicured moss gardens and blossoming trees met a clean morning breeze off the water. It was easy to understand why a philosopher found clarity here.

My friend Christos and I made a habit of early starts before our families woke. On one such morning we climbed to Kiyomizu-dera (UNESCO), its wooden stage cantilevered over a forested hillside with sweeping views of Kyoto&#8217;s rooftops and the wooded mountains beyond, framed by the old Higashiyama neighborhood below. On the way back we stopped at the picturesque five-storey Yasaka Pagoda and discovered one of Kyoto&#8217;s finest bakeries, bringing back a breakfast that made us heroes for the day.

One of the most iconic stops in Kyoto was Fushimi Inari Taisha, the shrine of ten thousand vermillion torii gates dedicated to Inari, the Shinto deity of rice and prosperity, whose sacred messengers are the fox, a reminder of how Shinto consecrates the natural world, animal and plant alike, as divine. The trails lead deep into a sacred forest of cedar, cypress and maple on Mount Inari. The lower levels were packed with visitors, but higher up the mountain the crowds thinned, the forest thickened, and the experience became something closer to pilgrimage than tourism.

Our Kyoto journey ended on a high note: a traditional boat ride downstream through the dramatic Hozugawa Gorge, steered by oarsmen using only bamboo poles and oars. Grey herons stood motionless in the shallows, kingfishers darted across the water, and mandarin and spot-billed ducks dotted the river in abundance. On the rocks, cormorants held their wings wide open to dry, one of the most memorable sights of the entire trip. The ride delivered us into Arashiyama, where we walked through the famous bamboo grove before discovering Tenryu-ji (UNESCO), a Zen Buddhist temple founded in the 14th century whose Sogen Pond Garden uses the forested mountains of Arashiyama as borrowed scenery, dissolving the boundary between the designed and the wild. It was, in many ways, the perfect encapsulation of everything Kyoto had shown us.

The largest torii gate in the world, standing ~34 meters tall, at Kumano Hongu Taisha

The Kumano Kodo UNESCO pilgrimage

This was the most anticipated part of the trip, at least for me, and certainly the most difficult to plan. The Kumano Kodo is one of only two UNESCO-designated pilgrimage trails in the world alongside the Camino de Santiago, and the only one where two sacred traditions &#8211; Shinto and Buddhism &#8211; have coexisted on the same trails for over a thousand years, drawing emperors, samurai and ordinary pilgrims alike through the sacred mountains of the Kii Peninsula.

The heart of the pilgrimage &#8211; the Nakahechi trail &#8211; took us about five hours to complete, gaining several hundred meters of elevation from the ancient starting point at Takijiri-oji through dense sacred forest to the village of Takahara. The trail was not easy, but our kids surprised us completely, charging ahead while the adults struggled to keep up. What made it truly unforgettable was the rain. We were soaked from start to finish, the only rainy day of our entire trip, and walking in silence through a dripping ancient forest truly felt like a ritual. We experienced Shinrin-Yoku &#8211; forest bathing &#8211; in its most literal sense!

Along the trail and throughout the journey, Christos and I religiously collected our goshuin at the shrines and temples we visited, red seals stamped and calligraphy handwritten into our goshuincho, the traditional dedicated books carried by pilgrims throughout Japan. Each entry is a small act of devotion and a mark of the sacred sites visited, and by the end of the trip ours were among our most treasured souvenirs.

That day we also stood before the Oyunohara Otorii, the largest torii gate in the world, standing ~34 meters tall and 42 meters wide, erected at the entrance to the original sandbank site of Kumano Hongu Taisha where legend has it the Kumano deities descended to earth in the form of three moons into the branches of a giant oak tree. The gate marks the threshold to Hongu Taisha, the head shrine of over 3,000 Kumano shrines across Japan, and the spiritual destination to which all Kumano Kodo pilgrimage routes ultimately lead. Standing beneath it in the mist and rain, dwarfed by its scale, the boundary between the sacred and the natural felt very thin indeed.

During our three days in the area we stayed at a beautiful glamping site on the Wakayama coast, inside Yoshino Kumano National Park, surrounded by dramatic cliffs above the Pacific, with white-tailed eagles and blue rock thrushes surveilling the shoreline. We also had one of the most memorable culinary experiences of the trip: a BBQ feast of Wagyu beef, fresh scallops and seasonal local Wakayama produce.

The Kumano Kodo sits within Yoshino-Kumano National Park, one of Japan&#8217;s oldest protected areas, home to Japanese macaques, Asian black bears and hundreds of bird species. This landscape is also one of Japan&#8217;s finest examples of the Satoyama concept, the centuries-old practice of sustainably managing the border zone between village and mountain, the very landscape the Nakahechi trail winds through. In 2010 the Satoyama Initiative was launched jointly by Japan&#8217;s Ministry of Environment and the United Nations University, recognising this model as a global blueprint for societies in harmony with nature.

We kept many trails and sites for our next visit, including Nachi Falls, the tallest waterfall in Japan at 133 meters, whose cascading waters are themselves enshrined as a Shinto deity at Kumano Nachi Taisha.

The Kumano Kodo left us with a key question: how has Japan managed to hold on to all of this, despite being one of the world&#8217;s most modern and developed nations?

A majestic cormorant drying its wings on the rocks of the Hozugawa River

When faith and culture protect nature &#8211; Japan and beyond

Japan&#8217;s sacred forests are not an exception &#8211; they are a statement about what happens when nature becomes culture through faith. Across the country, over 80,000 Shinto shrine forests and thousands of Buddhist temple groves form an invisible protected area network that no government decree created and no budget maintains. They endure because they are sacred.

But Japan has taken this further than most. What began as spiritual reverence has evolved into science. Shinrin-Yoku &#8211; forest bathing &#8211; is now a medically recognized practice in Japan, where doctors prescribe time in forests specifically for their healing effects. The science is compelling: spending two to three days in a forest has been associated with a 50% or more increase in natural killer cells, with effects lasting up to 30 days, largely thanks to terpenes, the organic compounds emitted by trees and plants that we breathe in as we walk. Faith opened the door; science walked through it.

What is remarkable about Japan is that this reverence for nature has not stayed in the shrine; it has migrated into medicine, business and national policy, becoming a defining thread of Japanese culture. Today, over 200 Japanese multinationals and businesses are integrating the TNFD, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures, the highest uptake of any country globally. Japan is also among the most committed nations to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and its 30&#215;30 goal, striving to protect 30% of its land and sea by 2030.

Japan may be the most visible example of faith-based conservation at scale, but it is far from alone. India is home to between 100,000 and 150,000 sacred groves across Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions, biodiversity refugia that have outlasted centuries of development pressure because communities believe them to be divine. In the Middle East, the ancient Islamic Hima system, a sharia-rooted tradition of community-managed conservation areas, has been quietly protecting landscapes across the region for over a thousand years, including in countries I have had the privilege of working in closely.

In Ethiopia, 35,000 Orthodox Tewahedo church forests form one of the country&#8217;s most important conservation networks, the last fragments of highland forest in a heavily deforested landscape. In Christianity more broadly, Laudato Si, Pope Francis&#8217;s landmark 2015 encyclical addressed to every person on the planet, called for an urgent ecological conversion, reminding 1.3 billion Catholics that care for creation is not optional but a moral imperative. And in Bhutan, where our family was fortunate to travel a few years ago, the intertwined traditions of Bon and Buddhism have shaped an entire socio-economic philosophy, captured in the Gross National Happiness index, that has kept over 50% of the country forested and became a global reference for development in harmony with nature.

These traditions did not coordinate. Yet independently, across millennia and continents, they arrived at the same truth: that nature is sacred, and what is sacred must be protected.

On this Earth Day, that convergence is perhaps the most powerful reminder we have. We are not separate from nature &#8211; we are part of it. And this planet, with all its forests, rivers, groves and living creatures, is the only home we have ever shared.

Our oarsmen navigating the Hozugawa River with bamboo poles and oars

Question 2

Innovation as a positive-sum game with nature

Accepted Answer

As the old parable goes, we work and build and grow so that one day we can afford to stop and go fishing. The problem is that we never stop. We keep growing in numbers, in consumption, in complexity &#8211; and the global economy now requires a relentless expansion of products, services, and technologies just to sustain itself. At nearly 9 billion people, having inhabited almost every corner of the Earth, we have reached a point where the cumulative value of our innovations appears to be offset by the value we continue to extract from the natural world &#8211; the very world that made our flourishing possible.

Earth Overshoot Day &#8211; the date by which humanity has consumed more from nature than the planet can regenerate in a full year &#8211; fell on July 24 in 2025. The first time we overshot was in 1970. In half a century, we have gone from living within our means to consuming the equivalent of 1.8 Earths per year.

The engine driving that trajectory is the way we innovate. More than a decade ago, I completed my PhD in strategy and innovation as part of what was then the largest management research project in Canadian history. I traveled to China, Taiwan, India, Switzerland, France, and California studying how nations and organizations compete through innovation &#8211; how they create value, capture it, and govern the partnerships that bring new technologies to market.

But what the field of innovation management had almost nothing to say about, back then, was nature &#8211; and the profound ways it underpins everything we build. The frameworks we used to map the logic of innovation were entirely disconnected from ecological systems. Looking back, that absence was a fundamental limitation of the social sciences &#8211; and of the economic system they were built to describe.

The core challenge now is to redesign these games &#8211; to innovate in ways that account for the full lifecycle of products and services and their relationship with the living world. That is what it means for innovation to be a positive-sum game with nature.

Innovating with nature &#8211; the RISE framework

Schumpeter, widely regarded as the father of innovation studies, described innovation as &#8220;creative destruction.&#8221; What he could not have anticipated was the ecological toll of that destruction. By solving one problem, we have systematically generated others, and too many of these unintended costs have been borne by the natural world. As Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia observed, 90% of a product&#8217;s environmental footprint is determined at the design stage. This is where the game must change.

The RISE framework offers a practical lens for innovating with nature rather than against it.

R &#8211; Reduce resource extraction. The starting point is design itself: products must be conceived from the outset to consume fewer natural resources, accounting not just for financial costs but for the full ecological cost of extraction &#8211; the damage to ecosystems and ecosystem services that conventional pricing ignores. Designing for durability follows naturally from this logic &#8211; every year added to a product&#8217;s lifespan is raw material not extracted, energy not consumed, waste not generated. This is why France became the first country to criminalize planned obsolescence, and why Canada followed. Biomimicry and biophilic design extend this thinking further, drawing on nature&#8217;s 3.8 billion years of R&D to develop materials and systems that are inherently more efficient and regenerative.

I &#8211; Integrate circularity. Linear systems that extract, produce, and discard must give way to designs that eliminate waste from the outset &#8211; closing material loops across entire product lifecycles. Companies that adopt this approach align with tightening regulations, including Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, which hold manufacturers accountable for the full end-of-life impact of their products.

S &#8211; Systemize lifecycle thinking. No product exists in isolation. A full lifecycle approach accounts for all direct and indirect ecological costs across supply chains, demanding genuine collaboration with clients, suppliers, and the ecosystems they depend on.

E &#8211; Enrich ecosystems. The net-positive step: innovation that actively repairs what has been damaged. Companies using invasive seaweed or ocean plastic as raw materials exemplify this logic &#8211; turning ecological liabilities into design assets.

Businesses adopting this framework will gain a competitive advantage on multiple fronts, attracting talent, appealing to increasingly conscious consumers, and staying ahead of tightening regulations, including TNFD nature disclosure requirements.

The knowledge gap

The barrier to implementing this framework is primarily educational. Before my PhD, I trained as an industrial engineer. In four years of study, I was never once taught to account for nature in design or business decisions. The scientific revolution of the 17th century introduced a mechanistic worldview that reduced nature to passive matter, and the institutional model that spread globally from post-revolutionary France entrenched what sociologists call knowledge fragmentation &#8211; the division of human understanding into sealed disciplinary silos. Weber called it the &#8220;disenchantment of the world.&#8221; The engineer and the ecologist rarely share a classroom, let alone a design table.

AI as a bridge

AI offers genuine hope as a bridge across this knowledge gap. It can accelerate convergence in three interconnected ways.

First, knowledge integration: AI can help organizations collect and analyze the vast amounts of nature and biodiversity data required to identify nature risks and nature opportunities across their operations and supply chains. This dramatically accelerates the adoption of frameworks like the TNFD and tools like ENCORE and IBAT &#8211; developed in partnership with IUCN &#8211; by making complex biodiversity assessments faster, cheaper, and more actionable. AI also helps translate these dependencies and opportunities into financial terms &#8211; speaking the language of the boardroom and making the case for nature on the balance sheet. Ultimately, AI can help embed nature into engineering, design, strategy, and decision-making at every level of an organization.

Second, direct conservation: AI-powered monitoring tools &#8211; combining computer vision, satellite imagery, and acoustic sensors &#8211; are making ecosystem monitoring faster, cheaper, and more accurate than ever. For example, Google&#8217;s SpeciesNet can identify nearly 2,500 species from camera trap images, allowing research teams to process millions of photographs in days rather than years.

Third, AI offers a path to decoupling economic growth from demographic growth. If we had to pin down the current ecological crisis to one root cause, it would be the human population explosion of the past century &#8211; and the economic models that have made relentless demographic growth a prerequisite for prosperity. More people has meant more consumption, more extraction, and more pressure on ecosystems. AI is beginning to change this equation. Japan&#8217;s Society 5.0 &#8211; a human-centered vision that harnesses AI and robotics to sustain economic productivity despite a shrinking and ageing population &#8211; points toward a future where vitality no longer depends on more people consuming more resources. It is perhaps the most profound contribution AI can make: helping us grow wiser and wealthier without needing to grow larger.

Redesigning the rules of the game

The good news is that the field is catching up &#8211; even if the economy has not yet followed. Sustainable innovation is now a recognized discipline in its own right, with leading institutions from MIT Sloan to Cambridge&#8217;s Institute for Sustainability Leadership building programs around the nature-positive economy. The science is unambiguous: there is no economy without nature. Every product, every service, every technology ultimately rests on ecosystem function &#8211; not half the world&#8217;s GDP as some estimates conservatively suggest, but all of it.

The RISE framework, the growing field of sustainable innovation, and the emergence of AI as an ecological bridge all point toward the same possibility: an innovation system that restores as much as it extracts, creates value for economies and ecosystems alike, and grows wiser without needing to grow larger. That is the positive-sum game of innovation. And perhaps that is also the answer to the old parable &#8211; we do not need to stop innovating to go fishing. We just need to make sure there are still fish left when we do.

On a research trip to India with my PhD advisor &#8211; the late Prof. Roger Miller &#8211; and his wife

Question 3

Cape Town to Dubai: The nature of livable cities

Accepted Answer

My recent family trip to South Africa made me rethink my perception of cities, particularly as we explored Cape Town and its surroundings.

Here was a city that had woven nature and biodiversity into urban life &#8211; shaping a place that feels more resilient, more livable, and healthier for children growing up within it.

While we could choose to live outside cities in more natural settings, we remain drawn to the energy, diversity, and opportunities that urban life offers. That’s why I moved my family from Montreal to Dubai a few years ago &#8211; to be at the center of action in the Middle East, surrounded by people, ideas, and experiences that continually shape and challenge us, while giving us the chance to make a meaningful impact and influence the world around us.

Integrating nature into cities is not a new idea. From the gardens of Babylon to the great public parks of the nineteenth century, green space was once inseparable from urban life. Somewhere along the way, under the pressure of population growth, real estate, and short-term thinking, we pushed nature to the margins of city design and governance.

By 2050, roughly 70% of humanity will live in cities. We urgently need to transform these urban areas into more just, inclusive, and healthy environments &#8211; where children can play outdoors, reconnect with the natural world, and where biodiversity can thrive alongside us &#8211; a goal that some cities, like Cape Town, are already showing is possible.

The African penguins at Boulders Beach, Cape Town

Our family journey through Cape Town

I don&#8217;t usually linger long in cities when travelling with family, but Cape Town earned a full week &#8211; and it gave back more than we expected.

We arrived at the V&A Waterfront, the beautifully restored port area built around an old Victorian harbor &#8211; one of the most walkable urban waterfronts I have encountered, with cafes and terraces spilling out towards the ocean. Our hotel, a converted nineteenth-century prison, set an appropriately layered tone for what was to come.

The following day we drove south with our guide Clement along one of the world&#8217;s great coastal roads, stopping through the Table Mountain National Park &#8211; which stretches from the heart of the city all the way to Cape of Good Hope, the most southwestern point of the African continent. We encountered elands and bonteboks grazing in fynbos (the low, hardy shrubland unique to this region), wild ostriches, Egyptian geese, and hundreds of species of the Cape Floristic Region&#8217;s extraordinary plants, most famously the Protea. At Boulders Beach, we sat quietly among one of the last remaining African penguin colonies &#8211; a fragile, moving encounter with a species under serious threat. At the Cape Point lighthouse, the views across both oceans felt like standing at the edge of the world.

The days that followed, we hiked Table Mountain to the upper plateau, with its sweeping views over the city, the Cape Peninsula and both oceans, and bathed at Camps Bay in bracingly cold Atlantic water. But two experiences stood apart: the District Six Museum &#8211; housed in a former church, it gave our children their first visceral encounter with the reality of Apartheid &#8211; and Robben Island, where our guide had spent years imprisoned alongside Mandela himself, who served 18 of his 27 years in prison on that island. He walked us through those corridors with an intensity that filled every room.

We ended the week in Franschhoek, a small valley town tucked between the Wemmershoek and Groot Drakenstein mountains, where French Huguenot refugees built a winemaking tradition that still thrives today. We rode the Franschhoek Wine Tram between estates, stayed in a cabin overlooking a creek and vineyards, and ate extraordinarily well.

On the drive back to Cape Town we stopped at the Iziko South African Museum &#8211; sitting within the historic Company&#8217;s Garden. Among its extraordinary collection, the one that stopped us in our tracks were the therapsids: 250 million-year-old mammal-like reptiles from the Karoo, the ancient creatures that bridge the gap between reptiles and the first mammals, and whose fossils survived the greatest extinction event our planet has ever known. Just outside, the garden, originally laid out in 1652 by the Dutch East India Company &#8211; history&#8217;s first multinational corporation and the organization that created the world&#8217;s first stock exchange &#8211; is a green oasis at the heart of the city, quietly connecting nature and urban life.

Discovering the Seal Platform at Cape Town&#8217;s harbor (a rest area for Cape fur seals visiting the harbor)

How Cape Town thrives with nature

Few cities are framed by nature quite so dramatically. Table Mountain &#8211; one of the oldest mountains on Earth &#8211; rises directly behind the city center. The Cape Peninsula stretches south into the ocean, flanked on one side by the cold Atlantic and on the other by the warmer waters of False Bay. And beneath all of it lies one of the most extraordinary ecosystems on the planet.

Walking the fynbos with our guide Clement, we saw how Cape Town sits at the heart of the Cape Floristic Region &#8211; a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site and the smallest of Earth&#8217;s six floral kingdoms, yet the richest per unit of area. Over 9,000 vascular plants grow here, nearly 70% found nowhere else on Earth. Beyond Table Mountain National Park, the city protects its ecosystems through more than 20 urban reserves, maintaining ecological corridors that thread nature into the fabric of the city.

Capetonians engage with wildlife in remarkable ways. In the City Nature Challenge &#8211; a global citizen science competition &#8211; Cape Town has consistently ranked among the top cities since 2019, winning both the most species and most observations categories and demonstrating how residents value urban biodiversity. We saw this instinct firsthand while waiting for our boat to Robben Island: my boys were transfixed by a platform covered in Cape fur seals, designed to give the animals their own space while a permanent disentanglement program monitors the harbor. At Boulders Beach, we walked among African penguins &#8211; now Critically Endangered &#8211; and noticed the artificial nest boxes that help more chicks survive to leave the nest, increasing fledgling survival by 16.5%

Cape Town ranks first in Africa for quality of life and livability, and 9th globally for resident-rated access to nature and green spaces &#8211; surveys consistently citing its natural beauty and coastline as the primary draw. It has been named Africa&#8217;s Leading City Destination four consecutive years. It is a city shaped by its nature &#8211; and one that, to a remarkable degree, has chosen to shape itself around protecting it.

That choice, however, is far from universal.

New York a few decades ago

The cost of rapid urban growth

Working recently on an urban biodiversity strategy for a Middle Eastern capital, I witnessed first-hand the remarkable progress cities in the region are making &#8211; new restoration programs, expanding green areas, stronger governance, and growing political commitment to biodiversity. Yet rapid urban growth remains a formidable challenge, generating pollution, and steadily eroding ecosystems in ways that can quietly offset even the most ambitious conservation investments. Visiting nature reserves, parks, and waterways across the region, I encountered this contradiction directly &#8211; illegally dumped waste, for example, a recurring sight in some of the most beautiful landscapes, undermining restoration work that had taken years and significant resources to achieve.

Globally, perhaps no choice shapes our lifespan and healthspan more profoundly &#8211; or more invisibly &#8211; than the decision to live in a large city. Blue zones &#8211; those rare places on Earth where people regularly live past 100 &#8211; are villages, islands, and rural communities: Okinawa, Sardinia, the Nicoya Peninsula, Ikaria. Not megacities. The two leading global risk factors for premature death are high blood pressure and air pollution &#8211; both of which cities systematically worsen. WHO estimates that 99% of the world&#8217;s population breathes air that exceeds safe limits, and air pollution alone now accounts for 8.1 million premature deaths per year, surpassing tobacco.

Today, more than half the world lives in cities, and in more industrialized nations that figure exceeds 80%. But while cities are a relatively recent chapter in our evolutionary history, without them we would not have built civilization. Memphis, Babylon, Athens, Rome, and more recently Paris, Washington or Beijing: all were founded on fertile, healthy ecosystems &#8211; primarily freshwater systems and rivers &#8211; the very ecosystems suffering the most damage today. Over the past fifty years, freshwater wildlife populations have declined by 85%, and rivers are today the conduit for 80% of ocean plastics.

Coastal cities have also flourished thanks to &#8211; and at the expense of &#8211; their surrounding ecosystems. In The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky recounts how the waters surrounding New York once contained half the world&#8217;s oysters &#8211; a living filtration system and food source for rich and poor alike, spread across 350 square miles of estuary beds. By 1930 the last of them were permanently closed, killed by industrial pollution.

Similar stories are found around the planet. Dubai for example was built on pearls. But when the trade collapsed in a single decade in the 1930s &#8211; due to Japanese cultured pearls and the Great Depression arriving simultaneously &#8211; the pearl beds fell silent and the relationship between the city and its sea was permanently redrawn.

Cities are also the primary drivers of global energy consumption and the extractive economy. They account for roughly 75% of global energy demand &#8211; a share accelerating rapidly with the rise of AI and data centers. The scale is almost impossible to conceptualize since the turn of the century, humans, as a single species, consume more energy than all other animals on Earth combined.

Urban areas also consume the vast majority of the world&#8217;s cement and concrete &#8211; materials whose production requires enormous quantities of sand, primarily extracted from riverbeds, devastating the very freshwater ecosystems on which the earliest cities were built.

This is a topic close to my own family story. My great-grandfather established Egypt&#8217;s first cement factory in 1911, in partnership with an Italian industrialist &#8211; one small thread in a pattern that has since become staggering. Global material extraction has increased more than tenfold since 1900, driven primarily by minerals such as sand, gravel, and limestone &#8211; which now make up roughly 45% of today&#8217;s 107 billion tons of annual global extraction.

We live in an era that likes to think of itself as weightless &#8211; where value is created by algorithms, not quarries. The ground tells a different story. As Ed Conway writes in Material World: no matter how advanced we become, our civilization remains rooted in the materials we pull from the Earth. According to the IPCC, three-quarters of the infrastructure that will exist in 2050 has yet to be built &#8211; the largest wave of construction in human history, concentrated overwhelmingly in the Global South.

This shift from a biomass-based living world to a built, mineral one is fundamentally altering how we relate to nature. It has given rise to one of the most dangerous developments in our societies &#8211; what experts call environmental generational amnesia, or the shifting baseline syndrome. Each new generation grows up knowing only the world they inherit &#8211; cities of concrete and noise, rivers without fish, skies without birds &#8211; and accepts it as normal. The diminished, engineered world becomes the baseline &#8211; and what was lost is simply never missed.

Too many cities built their wealth by consuming nature. A few &#8211; Cape Town among them &#8211; are learning to restore it.

The Urban Biodiversity Coalition (including me) at Terra, Expo City in Dubai

Urban nature and biodiversity in action

Cities with the highest livability and quality of life scores consistently share a respect for nature. Cape Town is a striking example, and a growing number of cities around the world are following a similar path.

Montreal, the city where I have lived longest, exemplifies this. Montrealers hold Mount Royal at the heart of their city as almost sacred: by law, no building may surpass the mountain&#8217;s summit at 233 meters. From its unpaved trails, the breeze carries the scent of pine and maple, squirrels cross the leafy floor and songbirds flit between the trees &#8211; nature embedded in urban life, not appended to it. It is perhaps unsurprising from a city that hosts the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), whose province of Quebec became the first subnational government in the world to contribute financially to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, at CBD COP16 in Colombia in 2024.

Other cities have also raised the bar. London launched the world’s first City Biodiversity Action Plan in 1996. Paris renewed its Biodiversity Strategy in 2024, creating new urban forests across the city and, following a citywide ban on pesticides in public spaces, now hosts 118 documented species of wild bees. I remember walking those streets with my wife and young boys years ago, struck by how naturally the city held it all together &#8211; the centuries of layered architectural heritage, the Seine, the tree-lined boulevards, the parks &#8211; each element protecting and enhancing the others.

Berlin’s Biotope Area Factor, in place since 1994, legally requires new buildings to include ecologically effective green space, inspiring similar standards across Europe. Singapore, along with Nagoya, Montreal, and Curitiba, co-developed the Singapore Index on Cities’ Biodiversity, the first international framework recognizing cities as key actors in global biodiversity governance.

Global standards are reinforcing these local ambitions. The WHO&#8217;s 3-30-300 rule &#8211; every resident should see at least 3 trees from home, live in a neighborhood with 30% tree canopy cover, and be within 300 meters of green space &#8211; gives planners a simple, powerful benchmark for urban nature equity. The IUCN&#8217;s Urban Nature Indexes provide cities everywhere with a science-based framework to measure and improve their ecological performance.

In the Middle East, Abu Dhabi and Dubai hold the top regional livability positions, and their rising rankings track with investments in nature. During the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi last October &#8211; which I contributed to as IUCN Ambassador &#8211; Abu Dhabi announced a binding Biodiversity Policy Decree alongside an expansion of protected areas to cover 20% of emirate land. Dubai also shared many of its nature and biodiversity initiatives at the Congress, including the Dubai Reef &#8211; one of the world&#8217;s most ambitious marine restoration programs &#8211; for which I moderated a panel with experts in reef restoration and marine biology.

In Dubai, I was also recently invited to join the Urban Biodiversity Coalition &#8211; launched by Terra, Expo City Dubai, in 2025, representing Roland Berger &#8211; which brings together over 40 organizations to embed biodiversity into the fabric of city life. One of its initiatives is Dubai&#8217;s participation in the City Nature Challenge, the global citizen science competition that in 2025 mobilized over 100,000 people across 660+ cities in 62 countries &#8211; among them Cape Town, Singapore, and Tokyo. What connects all these cities is a simple truth: when residents notice wild things in their midst, they begin to protect them.

Just as in Cape Town, these initiatives show that when cities intentionally embed nature into urban life, both people and biodiversity benefit.

Mountain biking with my boys at Mushrif Park, Dubai

Closing the nature loop

As more people live in cities, we have a moral duty to rethink how we plan, design, and inhabit them. We owe it to our families and communities &#8211; especially our children &#8211; to create healthy, green spaces where they can spend time and connect with nature.

Cities face a polycrisis &#8211; climate risks, health challenges, food insecurity, and economic fragility. Integrating nature into urban spaces helps address these challenges directly: green infrastructure manages floodwaters, urban forests cool streets and reduce heat stress, biodiverse ecosystems support pollination, food systems, and mental wellbeing, while restored habitats allow wildlife to return, strengthening ecological resilience alongside human communities.

Witnessing even small signs of wildlife returning reminds us that cities &#8211; and the children growing up in them &#8211; can reconnect with nature if we make space for it.

I think of my boys in Cape Town, stumbling upon seals at the harbor, penguins nesting between the rocks on the beach, birds threading through the fynbos on a hillside trail. They understood, instinctively, what was worth protecting. That natural curiosity &#8211; present in every child before the world crowds it out &#8211; is something we often forget. Cape Town reminded us that a city can be alive with nature, and that children can see and care for it without being told. The question is whether we will notice, and whether we will make room for it in the cities we live in.

Question 4

The 5 essential shifts to build a nature-positive organization

Accepted Answer

The global order and economy appear to be going through seismic changes or, as Mark Carney (Canada’s PM) recently put it, a rupture. This moment of instability may offer an opportunity for global leaders to push for a transition towards a more sustainable, nature-positive economic model. Just last week, the high seas treaty came into force, proof that moments of rupture can catalyze the bold action nature needs.

The nature-positive economy can only be achieved if leaders have the right mindset and create the right cultures within their organizations, and if we start valuing nature at least in the same way we value the products and services we buy.

In this post, I share five shifts required for organizations to move from intention to action on their nature-positive journey. These ideas result from recent engagements, discussions, and several publications I highly recommend, including three books in particular:

Becoming Nature Positive, co-authored by Marco Lambertini, former Director General of WWF International, and six fellow leaders of the Nature Positive Initiative, provides a comprehensive roadmap for businesses transitioning to nature-positive operations.

The Responsible Company by Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s founder, and Vincent Stanley offers hard-won lessons on building a business that takes full responsibility for its environmental and social impacts.

Pricing the Priceless by Paula DiPerna, former President of CCX International and Special Advisor to CDP, explores the challenge of valuing ecosystem services through financial innovation.

Together, these works point to a simple truth: becoming nature-positive requires fundamental shifts in how organizations think, measure, design, and collaborate.

The five shifts organizations must make:

Recognize Earth&#8217;s limits

Measure nature&#8217;s value and regulate impacts

Create a nature mindset and culture

Design and innovate with nature

Collaborate through value chains and geographies

Recognize Earth&#8217;s limits

Human civilization has progressed for most of its recent history believing that nature and its bounties are limitless. This assumption was already exposed over 2,000 years ago when Eratosthenes calculated the Earth&#8217;s circumference for the first time in Egypt, yet two thousand years later, our economic institutions appear to have ignored this revelation altogether.

The 1972 Limits to Growth report, commissioned by the Club of Rome and developed by MIT, predicted that if growth continued at then-current rates, ecological collapse could occur by the middle of the twenty-first century. Fifty years on, we have lost 73% of monitored wildlife populations, altered 70% of Earth’s land, and degraded 50% of our ecosystems.

The tragedy of the commons is now happening at the planetary level. Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre reminds us that we have surpassed seven of the nine planetary boundaries &#8211; the critical thresholds that enabled human civilization to flourish. Overshoot Day has moved from December 25 in 1971, the first year humanity consumed more than Earth could regenerate, to July 24 in 2025. Even today, extraction pressures continue to expand, including in places like Venezuela, one of the few countries where over 50% of land remains protected.

Thankfully, recent global agreements such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework signal that the world may be ready for change.

The first shift organizations and governments must make is to fully understand Earth’s limits and recognize nature as a source of invaluable ecosystem services, a critical infrastructure, and a core element of national security. Following E.O. Wilson’s vision in Half Earth, a just partnership with the natural world is essential for our survival. The question is how we continue to innovate, compete, and grow while attaining this balance.

Measure nature&#8217;s value and regulate impacts

There is a widely cited figure suggesting that 50% of our economy depends on nature. I would challenge this &#8211; 100% of our economy and our lives are fully dependent on it. Our health, wellbeing, and quality of life are inseparable from nature. The problem lies in how we have evolved to see ourselves and our economies as separate from it. They are not.

To change this, we must first make nature visible in our economic systems.

Many nations are developing natural capital accounts following the UN’s System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), translating nature into metrics that can be tracked alongside GDP. In Pricing the Priceless, Paula DiPerna provides a comprehensive overview of progress in valuing biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Organizations must follow suit by measuring their dependencies on and impacts to nature, and integrating these into balance sheets and decision-making. Leading organizations are already adopting standards such as TNFD and CSRD alongside natural capital accounting methodologies. Through my work with Roland Berger in the UAE and Namibia, I have seen how quantifying ecosystem value &#8211; from mangrove coastal protection to kelp carbon sequestration &#8211; can fundamentally reshape how governments and businesses prioritize nature in strategic decisions.

Create a nature mindset and culture

You cannot manage what you don&#8217;t understand, and you cannot value what you don&#8217;t appreciate. This is why mindset and culture represent both the greatest barrier and the greatest opportunity for nature-positive transformation.

One of the biggest societal challenges globally is the lack of appreciation for the natural world. As Baba Dioum wisely said: &#8220;In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught.&#8221; Over 50% of us now live in cities, and too many children who become leaders are raised deprived of nature &#8211; often making decisions that further remove us from it and exacerbate the ecological crisis.

This lack of connection to nature is perhaps the biggest obstacle to progress. Education at the leadership level is the most powerful lever for change. New frameworks like the TNFD can help, but what&#8217;s even more important is hiring people who understand nature&#8217;s value and empowering them throughout the organization.

Governance is also essential &#8211; nature and sustainability should have dedicated functions reporting directly to the CEO. Over time, the combination of education and governance creates the mindset needed to transform how products and services are designed and delivered.

Design and innovate with nature

This shift presents perhaps the greatest opportunity for transformation and value creation in the nature-positive economy.

As Yvon Chouinard (Patagonia&#8217;s founder) and Vincent Stanley clearly articulate, 90% of a product&#8217;s environmental impacts are committed in the design phase. Design and engineering teams, including those in financial institutions, should work with nature not against it.

Organizations must treat nature as part of the value they create, not merely a risk to mitigate or a philanthropic concern. While technologies such as AI and GIS can help protect key biodiversity areas, the deeper challenge is rethinking products and services through a full lifecycle lens.

A simple test applies: if more of your product or service is sold, is nature better off? Are ecosystems and biodiversity thriving as a result?

Collaborate through value chains and geographies

Responsible organizations assess impacts across their entire value chain and lifecycle. The only way to make this happen is through collaboration with suppliers and partners along value chains.

Cross-border collaboration is equally unavoidable. Organizations with global footprints must apply the same standards wherever they operate, going beyond compliance to lead the transition to a nature-positive economy.

Nowhere is this more evident than in extractive value chains. Globalization has shifted many polluting and resource-intensive activities to countries with weaker regulations &#8211; including the sourcing of rare earth elements and critical metals for smartphones and electric vehicle batteries from places like the DRC, Myanmar, and Venezuela. Where local leadership falls short, multinational companies have an opportunity to step up &#8211; ultimately securing resilience and competitive advantage over the long term.

Looking ahead

The transition to a nature-positive economy is an imperative for organizational survival. Companies that fail to integrate nature into their strategy and operations will find themselves increasingly vulnerable to the destabilization of the very Earth systems their business models depend upon.

The Club of Rome&#8217;s 1972 warning is no longer theoretical &#8211; we are living the collapse they predicted. These five shifts offer the pathway out: not as isolated initiatives, but as interconnected levers for systemic change. Recognizing limits, measuring value, transforming cultures, redesigning with nature, and collaborating globally are the mechanisms that can redirect entire economic systems. The organizations bold enough to pull these levers together will create the regenerative, nature-positive, economy our planet desperately needs.

Question 5

What the Amazon taught me: Indigenous cultures are key to restoring the planet

Accepted Answer

The Amazon is the largest and most biodiverse rainforest on Earth, a critical carbon sink and climate regulator. It is also under immense threat. Global Forest Watch reports that Brazil has driven around 40–50% of global primary forest loss in recent decades, followed by Indonesia and the DRC. In just four decades, the Amazon has lost nearly 90 million hectares &#8211; an area the size of Texas.

The stakes could not be higher. Scientists at COP30 warn we&#8217;ve nearly exhausted our carbon budget for staying below 1.5°C &#8211; the threshold beyond which climate catastrophe accelerates. Richer nations have already spent most of this budget, while global emissions keep rising. The math is brutal: without immediately halting deforestation and phasing out fossil fuels, we will breach 1.5°C sooner than expected. And when the Amazon goes, so does our last, best chance at climate stability.

Halting deforestation is essential not only for climate but to protect the Amazon&#8217;s extraordinary biodiversity and the Indigenous cultures that have long sustained it. The Amazon is home to Indigenous peoples whose knowledge, spirituality, and traditions have safeguarded the ecosystem for millennia. But as the global economy and modern life encroach, many communities are pulled away from ancestral lands and practices &#8211; a tension that becomes all the more urgent as COP30 takes place in Belém, Brazil.

Twelve years ago, through my ecotourism business, I led a Canadian student group deep into the Amazon, where we helped a village build a youth center &#8211; a space where young people could preserve their traditional arts and music and reconnect with their cultural heritage. That experience taught me something profound: responsible impact travel can support Indigenous communities while offering travelers invaluable lessons about collaboration and humanity&#8217;s bond with nature.

In this essay, I share that journey and reflect on what I learned about the irreplaceable role Indigenous communities play as forest guardians. I examine how the extractive economic system and global consumption &#8211; particularly our appetite for meat &#8211; drive both deforestation and cultural erosion. I also explore signs of hope: from COP30 to recent gatherings in Cali and Abu Dhabi, the world is finally recognizing that Indigenous stewardship isn&#8217;t just morally right &#8211; it&#8217;s essential to our survival.

Our Canadian student group, celebrating the completion of their project in the Amazon

On the ground: Leading a community impact expedition in the Amazon

In February 2014, we flew into Manaus, the great gateway to the Amazon, and from there boarded a slow river boat heading deep into the rainforest. After hours of navigating the Amazon’s vast waterways, we finally reached the riverine community of Anamã. This small community sits in what might be called the Amazon&#8217;s &#8216;middle ground&#8217; &#8211; accessible enough to welcome visitors, yet still deeply shaped by traditional river life. Deeper in the forest, many isolated indigenous groups remain in voluntary isolation across the Brazilian Amazon.

This journey was part of an impact expedition organized through my ecotourism company, which over the years led hundreds of educational and community-focused expeditions across five continents. The trip and on-the-ground work were led by our Brazil expedition leader, Leonardo, in close collaboration with François, the head teacher of the Canadian school, who already knew the community and helped build trust and continuity.

The project itself had begun six months earlier. Together with the people of Anamã and Ingénieurs Sans Frontières (an NGO), we co-developed a plan for a small community and youth center built on stilts &#8211; combining traditional materials and techniques with a modern twist to withstand the dramatic seasonal floods of the Amazon floodplain.

We spent most of our two weeks in the Amazon working side by side with the villagers to advance the construction of this center. The students stayed in homestays with local families, fully immersed in their daily life &#8211; learning local recipes, helping with small chores, sharing long evening conversations, and discovering the slow rhythm of a community shaped entirely by the Amazon. They also bonded naturally with the youth of Anamã: playing football, joining in local games, and sharing laughter that transcended languages.

Our days on the river also revealed the Amazon in all its raw immediacy. We went piranha fishing, tasted fresh cacao fruit straight from the tree, learned forest skills from residents who read the landscape like a language, and spent one night sleeping on hammocks aboard a traditional wooden river boat, wrapped in the hum of the rainforest. We even swam in the warm, dark waters of the Amazon &#8211; a thrilling moment none of us forgot.

To close the trip, we flew to Rio de Janeiro, and our visit coincided with the height of the Rio Carnival, one of the most extraordinary cultural celebrations on Earth. For two days, we immersed ourselves in the electrifying energy of the city: the thundering samba rhythms echoing through the streets, and the sense of collective joy that swept through Copacabana, Ipanema, and beyond. We also spent time in Rio’s favelas, joining a samba percussion class and supporting a community-based tourism initiative that seeks to improve local livelihoods and the urban environment. It was such a powerful contrast to the Amazon!

Experiences like these reveal both the promise and the paradox of responsible tourism in remote areas. Done right, impact travel can support the preservation of Indigenous values and cultures while generating economic benefits that reduce pressure on forests. For travelers &#8211; especially young people &#8211; these journeys are transformative. Students return home with lessons about collaboration, humility, and humanity&#8217;s interdependence with nature that reshape their studies and their lives.

But we must also acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: even well-intentioned visits inevitably bring change. The very presence of outsiders &#8211; with our technologies, our economic power, our different values &#8211; begins to transform the cultures we seek to support. This is why such expeditions demand the highest degree of cultural sensitivity, genuine partnership, and above all, respect for communities&#8217; right to self-determination. And for some communities, like the Amazon&#8217;s uncontacted tribes, the most respectful choice is to leave them entirely undisturbed &#8211; to honor their desire for isolation as an act of preservation in itself.

Slash-and-burn clearing destroying sections of the Amazon to open land for economic use

The Amazon’s over-exploitation and the disappearance of indigenous cultures

Deforestation: a problem as old as civilization

The Amazon, along with Indonesia’s tropical forests and the Congo Basin, remain the largest tropical forests on the planet and the richest reservoirs of biodiversity &#8211; and simultaneously the most exploited. According to Global Forest Watch, Brazil, Indonesia, and the DRC together accounted for most global primary tropical forest loss in the last decades; Brazil alone suffered roughly 40–50% of that loss. Over the past four decades, the Amazon has lost roughly 90 million hectares of its forest cover, or nearly the size of Texas or Colombia.

But humanity&#8217;s assault on forests is hardly new. Deforestation has shadowed human civilization since its very dawn. The United States and Europe lost most of their primary forests over the last few centuries due to over-extraction. Long before, the great civilizations of ancient Greece, China, the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt severely degraded their ecosystems through deforestation, intensive agriculture, and unsustainable logging.

This over-exploitation of nature contributed both to the rise and the eventual collapse of these societies. As Jared Diamond notes in Collapse, “Deforestation was the major factor in all the collapses of past societies described in this book.” Greece’s forests tell a similar story: as early as 400 BC, Plato observed that “what now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away.” Today, only about a quarter of Greece remains forested.

In the mid-19th century, George Perkins Marsh, serving as U.S. Minister to Turkey, traveled extensively through Egypt and the broader Mediterranean region. What he witnessed there &#8211; the barren hillsides, the degraded soils, the desertification of once-fertile lands &#8211; became the foundation for his groundbreaking 1864 book Man and Nature. Marsh documented how ancient Mediterranean civilizations, including those of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, had brought about their own collapse through environmental abuse. Referring to these once-lush lands, he wrote that &#8220;the operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon.&#8221; Despite Marsh’s warnings, the United States and Europe still lost most of their primary forests, showing that scientific knowledge and modern governance alone have not been enough to safeguard these ecosystems. By contrast, Indigenous knowledge &#8211; developed and refined over millennia &#8211; offers essential lessons for protecting the Amazon and other remaining primary forests today.

Indigenous knowledge: more than a relic

Indigenous peoples have lived in and managed forests for thousands of years, developing ecological practices that align with natural cycles. Their wisdom &#8211; on when to harvest, when to let the land rest, how to maintain soil fertility, how to balance dietary needs with ecosystem stability, and even how to regulate family size in harmony with the ecosystem &#8211; offers crucial lessons for today’s environmental challenges.

Research indicates that about 80% of the planet’s biodiversity occurs on lands inhabited or managed by Indigenous peoples, highlighting their role as nature’s guardians. In the Amazon, Indigenous communities continue to maintain these ecosystems, including 95% of the world’s 196 uncontacted tribes (124 in Brazil alone, according to Survival International). Yet the pressures of modernization, urbanization, and cultural assimilation are reshaping these communities. More than half of Amazonian Indigenous peoples now live in towns or cities such as Manaus or Anamã; while many retain aspects of their traditions, most now speak Portuguese and practice Christianity.

If current trends of deforestation and displacement continue, the Amazon could lose another 25% of its current forest cover by 2050, bringing the total area at risk of ecological tipping points close to 50%, according to recent ecological models. This scenario would coincide with significant losses of Indigenous cultures, knowledge, and stewardship that have protected the forest for thousands of years.

The loss of indigenous cultures: Climate and biodiversity risks

The loss of Indigenous cultures is both a moral issue and a systemic risk for biodiversity and climate stability. Over centuries, conquest, colonization, and development eroded many traditional ways of life, and today, Indigenous communities face pressures from extractive industries &#8211; meat, timber, mining &#8211; as well as the allure of modernity: education, technology, consumer goods and urbanization. These forces can pull young people away from forest-based traditions, undermining both culture and the ecosystems these communities have protected for generations.

During my two weeks in the Amazon, I witnessed this paradox firsthand. Communities we met were deeply rooted in their ancestral lands, yet many of their children aspired to live beyond the forest, drawn by smartphones, urban ideas, and economic opportunity. These shifts risk breaking the delicate systems that have allowed ecosystems to regenerate for millennia.

The central challenge is clear: supporting Indigenous cultures so they can thrive in a changing world is not only a cultural and moral priority &#8211; it is essential for maintaining the ecosystems upon which life and climate stability depend.

Our student group, enjoying a football match with local kids

Re-igniting indigenous knowledge and cultures to reverse the crisis

As COP30 draws to a close in Belém, Brazil, the world is watching whether the country can deliver on its promise to end deforestation by 2030 &#8211; a commitment essential for keeping the 1.5 °C target within reach. Brazil has taken meaningful steps to achieve this goal by increasingly recognizing the central role of Indigenous peoples in protecting these forests. For example, the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), launched at COP28, dedicates at least 20% of its resources to Indigenous communities. Initiatives such as the COP30 “Circle of Peoples” and the International Indigenous Commission integrate Indigenous voices into climate negotiations, while the COP Village and regional mobilization meetings help prepare communities to participate effectively.

Other international platforms are also advancing Indigenous rights and recognition. At UNCBD COP16 in Cali, Colombia, a new body for Indigenous peoples was formally established, giving them a stronger voice in global biodiversity governance. At the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi, the IUCN’s first-ever Indigenous Peoples Summit marked a historic milestone for the world’s largest conservation organization.

Legal precedents are also setting a powerful example. Ecuador became the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution, a framework that paved the way for landmark rulings such as the Amazonia Waorani tribe winning protection against corporate encroachment on their lands. These landmark decisions have inspired other nations: in Brazil, the Supreme Court recently rejected the “time-limit” (marco temporal) thesis, reaffirming constitutional protection for Indigenous territories &#8211; a victory for forest-dependent communities across the country.

Building on global and national commitments and initiatives, the private sector also has a critical role to play. By recognizing the intrinsic value of Indigenous knowledge and the importance of protecting primary forests and their ecosystems, businesses and NGOs can support communities through ecotourism, regenerative agriculture, biodiversity-based payments, and other activities that restore rather than exploit.

At the same time, supporting Indigenous land rights and livelihoods comes with complexity. Modern influences and material temptations &#8211; including those that can arise even from well-intentioned impact travel projects like the one I led in the Amazon &#8211; can pull communities away from their traditional practices, weakening the stewardship that has preserved these forests for generations. Some groups, such as uncontacted tribes, may be better off remaining undisturbed and shielded from modern culture.

The question remains: are we truly listening to those who have protected these forests for millennia? Pledges, funds, legal victories, and responsible ecotourism experiences only matter if they translate into real rights, respect, and the strengthening of Indigenous culture in the forests and ecosystems where it counts most.

Re‑igniting Indigenous knowledge and cultures is not just about preserving tradition. It is a vital pathway to reversing ecological and climate breakdown, a test of justice and resilience, and a source of hope &#8211; for the Amazon, its peoples, and for all of us.

Question 6

The Last Natural Beaches: From the Mediterranean to the Caribbean

Accepted Answer

Over the years, I&#8217;ve witnessed the rapid transformation of some of the world&#8217;s most beautiful beaches &#8211; from the Mediterranean and Red Sea to Zanzibar, the Caribbean, and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Entire coastlines are being reshaped by uncontrolled development, pollution, and warming oceans that trigger unprecedented algal blooms and extreme weather events.

This past summer, my family and I escaped the heat for a few weeks on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, followed by a week in the Dominican Republic. In both places, we sought quiet moments in nature, away from the crowds, before the new school year began.

We had a wonderful time, but I couldn&#8217;t shake one troubling realization: finding natural, clean beaches &#8211; the kind that should be everywhere &#8211; has become nearly impossible. What was once the norm is now the exception.

But what&#8217;s behind this decline? Rapid coastal development, climate change, and pollution are steadily degrading these ecosystems, diminishing the experience for anyone who values nature.

In this article, I&#8217;ll outline how a path forward demands action on multiple fronts: protecting at least 30% of coastal ecosystems by 2030 through the Global Biodiversity Framework&#8217;s 30×30 initiative, slashing ocean pollution and plastics, controlling invasive seaweeds like sargassum, and preparing for the intensifying hurricanes that climate change is unleashing.

I&#8217;ll also explore two critical concepts every policymaker, investor and traveler should understand: the economic value of nature, which sustains long-term tourism and real-estate returns, and environmental generational amnesia &#8211; the risk that future generations will never know what pristine beaches once looked like.

The turquoise waters of Almaza Bay on Egypt&#8217;s Mediterranean coast

The Med: Balancing Development with Nature Conservation

We spent the first part of our summer on Egypt&#8217;s Mediterranean coast, staying on Sidi Abdel Rahman Bay &#8211; one of the most stunning stretches, about 130 km west of Alexandria near Alamein. We also stopped by Caesar&#8217;s Bay and Almaza Bay further west. Standing on those shores with my kids, I could see both the extraordinary beauty of this coastline and the pressures threatening to erase it.

The transformation has been staggering. Thirty years ago, much of Egypt&#8217;s 1,000 km Mediterranean coastline was relatively untouched. Today, fueled by Gulf investments, it&#8217;s an almost unbroken line of resorts and construction projects. The impact is impossible to ignore.

Development has left only a handful of protected areas along Egypt&#8217;s Mediterranean shore &#8211; and even these are under siege. They include: Sallum Protected Area near the Libyan border; El Omayed, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve about 80 km west of Alexandria; Lake Burullus, a Ramsar-designated wetland in the Nile Delta east of Rosetta; and Zaranik, at the eastern tip of Lake Bardawil, famous for producing Egypt&#8217;s finest Batarekh &#8211; salted mullet roe, a delicacy prized across the region.

I&#8217;m not against development &#8211; Egypt&#8217;s economy and jobs depend on tourism and investment. But there&#8217;s a balance to strike. When I&#8217;m on these beaches with my kids, I can&#8217;t help asking: will there be any natural coastline left for them when they&#8217;re my age?

Overdevelopment isn&#8217;t just an environmental issue &#8211; it&#8217;s self-defeating. Marinas disrupt coastal dynamics, resorts become overcrowded, erosion accelerates, waste piles up. The real tragedy? We&#8217;re eroding the very asset that made these places valuable: the pristine nature that drew people here in the first place. We&#8217;re killing the golden goose.

Other Mediterranean countries have been down this road. Spain overbuilt the Costa del Sol and Costa Brava &#8211; and is now fixing it. They&#8217;re restoring wetlands and dunes, restricting shoreline construction, and expanding marine protected areas. The Balearics are protecting Posidonia seagrass, and the Ebro Delta is being restored.

The pattern repeats across the region. Greece is making real progress toward protecting 30% of its waters by 2030, expanding marine reserves in the Ionian and Aegean, restoring seagrass, and protecting endangered monk seals. France has done the same &#8211; from the mainland to Corsica &#8211; through parks like Port-Cros and the Calanques that blend conservation with tourism. Turkey&#8217;s strengthened protection in Gökova Bay and Kaş-Kekova. Even transboundary efforts like the Adriatic-Ionian initiative show what&#8217;s possible when countries work together.

This matters because right now, only 1–3% of the Mediterranean is effectively protected. That&#8217;s nowhere near enough.

But coastal overdevelopment is only part of the crisis. The Mediterranean faces two other existential threats I witnessed during our stay: climate change and plastic pollution.

The warming is undeniable. The sea is heating 20% faster than the global average, and recent marine heatwaves are devastating life below the surface. Seagrass meadows are dying, corals are bleaching, mass die-offs are accelerating.

Then there&#8217;s the plastic. Recent estimates suggest about 300,000 tonnes enter the Mediterranean annually. Despite covering less than 1% of global oceans, it holds 7% of the world&#8217;s microplastics &#8211; one of the most polluted seas on Earth.

Looking ahead, Egypt and its Mediterranean neighbors need to commit fully to the 30×30 target &#8211; protecting at least 30% of coastal and marine ecosystems by 2030, as agreed at COP15. Stronger action on plastics is also needed &#8211; we need to ban single-use plastics, enforce proper waste management, and finalize the long-stalled global plastics treaty.

Some are already stepping up. In Egypt, VeryNile, Banlastic, and Plstka mobilize communities to collect and recycle waste. Plastic Bank, operating in Egypt since 2020, creates income for collectors while keeping plastic out of rivers and seas. Enaleia, a Greek nonprofit, works with Mediterranean fishers to recover and recycle marine litter. Clean Rivers, based in the UAE, stops waste upstream before it reaches the sea.

A great white heron on a mangrove beach surrounded by plastic &#8211; Los Haitises National Park

The Caribbean: Fighting Sargassum, Plastic and Hurricanes

The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, wasn&#8217;t our first time in the Caribbean &#8211; we&#8217;d discovered Cuba years ago when the kids were tiny, just 3 and 1, and had been to other islands like Barbados and the Bahamas. It was another unforgettable journey through vibrant coastlines and clear Caribbean waters, yet this time, we came face to face with environmental challenges we’d never experienced before.

Mid-August timing in the Caribbean isn&#8217;t ideal. It marks the start of hurricane season and the tail end of sargassum season &#8211; a relatively new phenomenon that&#8217;s plaguing coasts from the Caribbean and Mexico&#8217;s Yucatan Peninsula to Florida and all the way across the Atlantic to West Africa. But it was when we could travel, so we made it work.

Our trip took us through two contrasting sides of the Dominican Republic &#8211; the lush northeast around Samaná and Los Haitises National Park, where we stayed in an ecolodge in the tropical forest, and the sunny east coast, from Punta Cana to the natural beaches of Cotubanama and Isla Saona, which we reached through a breathtaking catamaran ride.

In the northeast, we discovered one of the country’s most beautiful non-touristy beaches – Playa El Morón – and spent time in the Caribbean&#8217;s largest protected mangrove area, Los Haitises National Park.

While I’d like to focus on the particular challenges of sargassum and hurricanes, I must also mention the plastic pollution reaching even the most remote Caribbean coastlines. During our boat tour through Los Haitises, I saw something that has haunted me: a solitary great white heron standing on what should have been a pristine beach. The sand was barely visible, blanketed by plastic debris. Our guide explained that the 74 national parks created by past governments to protect places like this are now under threat from budget cuts and waning political support. Even designated protected areas aren’t safe anymore.

On the way to the east and Punta Cana, we explored Santo Domingo&#8217;s UNESCO-listed old town, the first colonial city in the Americas, established by Christopher Columbus.

In Punta Cana, the Dominican Republic’s main beach tourism hub, we saw the sargassum crisis in full scale: tens of kilometers of shoreline smothered by brown mats of seaweed, the scent of rot and methane hanging in the air. The seaweed not only makes it impossible for beachgoers to enjoy swimming and relaxing on the sand, but it also suffocates marine life along the coastline. This prompted us to book a catamaran trip to the pristine beaches further south, safe from the sargassum, around Cotubanama National Park and Isla Saona &#8211; an extra expense, but absolutely worth it.

By mid-summer 2025, a record-breaking 40 million metric tons of sargassum had flowed through the Atlantic basin and Caribbean – nearly double the previous year. These blooms are primarily fueled by nutrient-rich agricultural runoff and warming seas, creating a growing ecological and environmental challenge for the region.

The economic challenges are also devastating: the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and other nations have reported hotel booking drops of 30-40% during peak sargassum periods. For the Dominican Republic &#8211; where tourism represents ~20% of GDP &#8211; President Luis Abinader warned at the UN Ocean Conference that sargassum could deal &#8220;a significant blow to the GDP of island nations,&#8221; threatening hundreds of coastal resorts and billions in investments.

Thankfully, just as entrepreneurs across the Mediterranean are finding ways to curb plastic pollution, others in the Caribbean are confronting the sargassum crisis. I recently met two of them working on innovative solutions.

The first, SOS Carbon in the Dominican Republic, was founded by MIT graduate Andrés Bisonó León. As Andrés explained: &#8220;SOS Carbon harvests seaweed from the coastline before it invades the beaches, leveraging local talent and existing infrastructure. The biomass is then processed and turned into commercial products—ranging from plastic alternatives and cosmetics to agricultural bio-inputs such as biostimulants.&#8221;

The second, Sway, buys sargassum &#8211; including from SOS Carbon &#8211; to create sustainable packaging alternatives and circular economy solutions, turning the invasive seaweed into a valuable resource. While these solutions are critical, much more is needed to tackle the problem at its source: reducing agricultural runoff and other sources of pollution.

On our last two days in the Dominican Republic, we got a glimpse of another growing crisis: hurricanes. Hurricane Erin, the first Atlantic storm of the 2025 season, brushed past the island. Its center stayed offshore, but we still faced heavy rains &#8211; a clear reminder of the region’s vulnerability.

Climate change is making these storms far more dangerous. The number of Atlantic hurricanes that rapidly intensify has doubled compared to 50 years ago &#8211; and they’re now strengthening about 28% faster. The impacts are devastating.

Just weeks after our trip, Hurricane Melissa tore through the Caribbean &#8211; particularly Jamaica &#8211; with winds reaching 185 mph. It was the strongest storm in the island’s 174-year recorded history, killing 30 people. The UN estimated the damage could equal Jamaica’s entire annual GDP of nearly $20 billion. Haiti and the Dominican Republic also suffered casualties and destruction, though Jamaica bore the brunt of the storm.

While travelers like us may occasionally face disruptions from sargassum or hurricanes, local communities endure far greater hardships &#8211; losing homes, livelihoods, and often spending years rebuilding their lives.

Enjoying the beautiful Playa El Moron &#8211; northeast of the Dominican Republic

Preserving the Natural Heritage of Our Coasts and Beaches

Natural beaches are becoming increasingly rare &#8211; not just in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, but across the globe. The same forces degrading coastlines and marine ecosystems are now reaching even the most remote shores.

If we want our children and grandchildren to experience the joy of playing on clean, living beaches during their summer breaks, we all have a role to play in reversing this trend.

Protecting the Mediterranean and Caribbean coasts will demand far stronger cooperation &#8211; among nations and across sectors alike. Only by working together can we rein in unchecked coastal development, keep agricultural runoff and plastic waste out of the sea, curb algal blooms, and restore life to the hundreds of expanding dead zones that now scar our oceans.

For that cooperation to take root, two concepts must be understood by decision-makers: the economic value of nature and environmental generational amnesia.

The economic value of nature is fundamental if development is to be balanced with conservation. Nature is essential infrastructure &#8211; it provides ecosystem services and long-term wealth that no engineered solution can replicate. This includes cultural and aesthetic services that sustain tourism and real-estate value over time. As coastlines lose clean water, fresh air, and natural beauty, they also lose their appeal to visitors and investors. There is a direct link between nature loss and financial loss, especially in coastal development.

Environmental generational amnesia, a term coined by psychologist Peter Kahn, describes how each generation grows accustomed to a more degraded environment, forgetting what once was. Children who grow up surrounded by concrete and plastic &#8211; even on beaches &#8211; cannot imagine shores with pure sand, clean water, native vegetation, and diverse seabirds or marine life. Over time, degraded beaches become the new normal. In both the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, studies show that even local communities have lost collective memory of once-vibrant coastal and underwater ecosystems, eroding conservation awareness.

True progress will require both cooperation and a renewed understanding of nature’s value &#8211; ensuring that coastal ecosystems continue to support communities, investors, and visitors alike. Our natural heritage, including our coasts, beaches, and marine life, deserves protection equal to that of our cultural heritage. Only then can we secure long-term prosperity and ensure that future generations inherit living, natural coastlines &#8211; not just memories of them.