Regeneration: Going Beyond Sustainability

InTent: What is regeneration, and how does it differ from sustainability?

The shift from sustainability to regeneration is not only about methods or goals, but about worldviews and paradigms: it is about moving from maintaining to improving and from extraction to reciprocity. From a regenerative lens, transformation is an ongoing, evolving process rather than a problem to be solved through rigid frameworks.

InTent: How is Unearthodox approaching the regenerative space?

In 2024, we launched the Regenerative Futures programme. Over the past year, we have explored regeneration by speaking with many people from very different backgrounds: conservation experts, artists, Indigenous leaders, and activists. We commissioned research to gather global insights on regeneration, and we also ran a creative call asking people to share how they see and feel regeneration through art and writing. Towards the end of this first phase, we brought some of these people together to collectively think about the future of regeneration. 

InTent:  And what have you learned so far?

Regeneration, as collectively understood and experienced, is not just about fixing things; it’s about rethinking whole systems. It’s not only about restoring nature but also about healing our relationships with the Earth, with each other, and with the past. It challenges linear, often polarising, dominant ways of thinking. Instead, it invites us to listen, honour and learn from other ways of operating, including Indigenous knowledge and wisdom passed down through generations, shared with care and rooted in lived experience. It asks us to move away from the status quo and rethink everything, from economics to governance to culture. The most powerful takeaway from a year of understanding regeneration from multiple perspectives is that reimagining a different future is not about arriving at a fixed vision but about cultivating the capacities to move with uncertainty, complexity, and plurality. A regenerative future is not something we can ‘design’ in isolation—it is something we co-create by centering the needs, knowledge, and participation of different communities.

But we have also noticed some tensions. Some people fear that ‘regeneration’ is becoming just another buzzword, like ‘sustainability’, a term that is used a lot, but not acted upon. Rather than simply using the term to describe ‘business-as-usual’ approaches without making real and radical changes. It's important to keep regeneration authentic and grounded in real, community-led action.

InTent:  What challenges do you face to push strategies that value and actively regenerate nature?

There are some critical and interrelated obstacles to creating societies that value and actively regenerate nature:

1. A fixation on global solutions. Existing economic, political and social models and their underlying assumptions tend to engender a one-size-fits-all approach to nature conservation that perpetuates inequalities and a disconnect between people and nature. Ideas that appear to work in one situation are scaled up and replicated with little regard for local contexts or the systems in which they operate.
2. Not enough focus on root causes and trade-offs. The transformative pathways and trade-offs required to create societies that value and actively regenerate nature are not well understood. As a consequence, existing solutions often perpetuate rather than address the ever-increasing disconnect between nature and people.
3. Not tapping the full potential of human ingenuity. Traditional conservation is not set up to incorporate the diversity of thinking and solutions that are needed to create resilient and regenerative communities. It often remains siloed from other sectors and its ability to support innovation and the integration of knowledge and values from elsewhere is fragmented. The continued application of conventional approaches that have been a focus of nature conservation since the end of the 19th century will not provide the diversity of thinking and solutions needed to regenerate nature.

InTent: So, how do you tackle them? 

Earlier this year, Unearthodox hosted a session titled "From Vision to Action: Regenerative Futures Towards Systemic Transformation for Nature and Society." The session, co-hosted by our ad-interim CEO Ryna Sherazi and renowned Futures and Systems Practitioner Bill Sharpe, brought together thought leaders and experts to explore what it would take to embed life, equity, and resilience into the DNA of our systems.

Ryna’s opening set the scene and established the focus for the conversations that followed.

She went on to highlight Unearthodox’s vision of creating a space where these innovators are not just supported but empowered to create ripples of transformation - shifting both structures and mindsets. 

Bill Sharpe followed by describing the Three Horizons Framework,  a strategic tool for thinking about change and guiding transformative innovation over time. He explained how it helps individuals and organisations explore how systems evolve and how to move towards a regenerative future.

Participants explored these questions and provocations during the session, exploring the need to shift from control-based, extractive systems toward regenerative, relational approaches in governance, leadership, and economics. They called for a redefinition of growth—asking ‘how much is enough?’—and emphasised the need for values-driven, long-term economic models.

Participants agreed that leadership must evolve—grounded in humility, informed by intergenerational dialogue, and guided by nature-based design. They further discussed the need to overcome resistance to change, embrace uncertainty, question outdated incentives, and build capacity for adaptive learning. Cross-sector, cross-regional, and intergenerational collaboration was seen as essential to move beyond fragmentation and enable trust-based, coordinated action. There was also a strong call to redefine success, with new metrics prioritising justice, interdependence, and ecological regeneration. Many emphasised that the path forward depends on fostering mutuality, distributed leadership, and co-creative approaches to enable deep, systemic transformation.