Exclusive: How the Villars Summit became the world’s most relevant Nature gathering

“The Most Important Nature Conversation of 2026 Isn’t at COP. It’s definitely in Villars”.

High above the valley floor, in the Swiss Alps near the Italian border – where the mountains still feel untouched, and silence carries weight – a defining global summit is taking place. There are no side stages or overwhelming crowds. No sense of spectacle. And yet, what is happening here may prove more consequential than many of the world’s largest gatherings.

The world’s sustainability agenda, into one room

The Villars Summit 2026, only in its fourth edition, convened a highly selected group of leaders in nature, spanning science, finance, business, policy, and the arts, around a deceptively simple question: how can human systems realign with nature before the cost of misalignment becomes irreversible?

Participation is capped at fewer than 300 attendees. Yet among those present are some of the most influential figures shaping the global sustainability agenda: scientists like Johan Rockström; policy leaders including Tony Goldner; corporate leaders including Mercuria’s founders, Roche’s André Hoffmann, Starbucks’ Marika McCauley Sine, and Breitling’s Aurelia Figueroa – alongside a wide group of Chief Sustainability Officers; financiers such as Lombard Odier’s Patrick Odier, Qatar’s Gonzalo Castro de la Mata, Banco Sabadell's Isabel Abellan Serna, Standard Chartered's Marisa Drew, and Pictet’s Marie-Laure Schaufelberger; greentech founders from GIST Impact to SYSTEMIQ, from Shayp and NatCap to illuminem; conservationists such as IUCN’s Grethel Aguilar, The Nature Conservancy’s Jennifer Morris, and Nature Positive’s Marco Lambertini; and even global voices including oceanographer Sylvia Earle, top artist Thijs Biersteker, filmmaker Fredi Devas, and White House chef Sam Kass.

Behind it is the incredible work of the Villars Institute team, led by Julia Marton-Lefèvre and Lee Howell, also an acclaimed illuminem voice, with Roman Guggisberg, Emma Benameur, and Joelle Chevalley, who have shaped the Summit into a gathering defined by depth.

Villars in two defining acts

Unlike most global gatherings, the Summit is structured not as a sequence of panels, but as a progression, a narrative arc that begins with a fundamental rethinking of humanity’s relationship with nature and moves toward the practical question of how systems can be redesigned to reflect that understanding. The urgency of that redesign is hard to overstate.

Climate change, biodiversity loss, and inequality – long treated as separate domains – are now colliding, reinforcing one another in ways that are increasingly visible and destabilizing. And yet, global responses remain fragmented. Climate negotiations proceed on one track, biodiversity on another, land use on a third. What Villars proposes is that this fragmentation is no longer tenable.

In the Summit’s Distinguished Lecture, Soumya Swaminathan, historic Chief Scientist of the World Health Organization, drew a direct line between environmental degradation and human health. Climate change, she suggested, is not an abstract future risk but a present reality shaping food systems, disease patterns, and economic stability.

The examples were concrete: community-led conservation strengthening resilience, women playing central roles in sustainable development, and local ecosystems determining global outcomes. The underlying message was difficult to ignore: the crisis is systemic.

That idea of systems and the need to rethink them runs through nearly every conversation at Villars, and each guest wants to bring its contribution. 

For businesses, fragmentation translates into uncertainty: unclear metrics, competing frameworks, and conflicting strategies. For governments, it complicates policy coordination. For communities, it obscures the reality that these crises are experienced as one.

The #1 highlight of these three days has been the premiere of a star-studded documentary, ‘A New Narrative for Nature,’ produced by the Villars Institute with Open Planet Studios. Data and science alone don’t move people. Stories do. 

The film, while at times leaning toward excessive optimism in its polished portrayal of models like Singapore’s integration of nature and urban life, stands out as a rare achievement: visually striking, intellectually grounded, and emotionally precise. Its storytelling is both disarming and insightful – at once humorous and deeply reflective – making complex ecological dynamics feel immediate and personal. It lingers in the mind long after viewing, not as advocacy, but as experience. A work of unusual clarity and craft, it succeeds in making nature not only understood, but felt. That shift, from abstraction to lived experience, feels increasingly necessary.

What the summit revealed

The summit unfolds around small working tables, where the frankness of the debate is striking. There is something about the setting – hours spent together in intimate rooms, with the vastness of the surrounding mountains – that reshapes the exchange. What emerges is not performance, but a rare openness: of ideas, of assumptions, and, at times, of uncomfortable truths.

In one such exchange, Doug Gurr, Director of the Natural History Museum, offered a reframing that lingered well beyond the session. Nature is not a constraint on economic growth but the infrastructure that makes it possible. And yet, unlike public roads or energy grids, it remains largely unpriced, underfunded, under-maintained, and treated as expendable.

Moments later, the conversation turned sharper. A leading international bank’s Chief Sustainability Officer openly asked if nature struggles to qualify as an investment class because it does not yield dividends. The room (filled with finance leaders) responded with disarming simplicity: why, then, do we [financial institutions] invest in gold? Isn’t it the same? An asset for its perceived stability and future worth.

In the dialogue “From Extraction to Regeneration,” Ismahane Elouafi, Chief Scientist of the FAO and illuminem Voice, laid out a central contradiction of the global economy: food systems, responsible for nearly 90 percent of deforestation and more than 70 percent of freshwater use, are at once a primary driver of environmental degradation and the most powerful lever for regeneration. The obstacle is not a lack of solutions, but a persistent failure to realign incentives at scale.

More than $7 trillion continues to flow each year into activities that degrade nature. An additional $1.25 trillion in subsidies actively accelerates that erosion.

Elsewhere, discussions on critical minerals addressed more questions: how can the solutions designed to repair ecological systems scale without reproducing the extractive logic they seek to replace? Jonquil Hackenberg, Chief Executive of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, outlined recipes for circularity by design: from regressive taxation for second-use to pure reward systems. In other words, the “next Vinted” would redistribute value back to the original creator each time a product is reused, aligning demand and supply around longevity rather than disposability.

In the session on the future of finance, attention turned to the ambition of mobilizing $300 billion annually by 2035 under the new global climate finance framework. Marie-Laure Schaufelberger of Pictet and Justin Mundy of the Qatar Foundation described a system constrained not by the absence of capital, but by its misalignment – held back by fragmented standards, unclear project pipelines, and a persistent asymmetry in perceived risk. Is the risk of inaction truly lower than the risk of deployed capital?

Martijn Oosterwoud, the Net Zero Managing Director of UBS, drawing on forthcoming analysis from the World Economic Forum, framed the challenge in similar terms. Capital is not scarce. But unlocking it at scale will require new instruments, blended finance approaches, and a deeper integration of nature into the logic of investment.

Turning to the corporate world, Chief Sustainability Officers Ashley N.P. Allen of Unifrutti and Eunice Heath of CRH shared in depth the ongoing trend, away from “compliance ESG” to resilience and long-term value creation.

Finally, the most arresting moment came in a session titled “Nature on the Balance Sheet.” A single figure, projected without embellishment, stilled the room: more than half of global GDP – roughly $44 trillion – is directly dependent on nature. Yet fewer than 1 percent of companies currently report on those dependencies.

Patrick Odier, with Naoko Ishii of the University of Tokyo, pointed at mechanisms to address cross-border spillovers, nature gains made in one region risk often shifts environmental costs elsewhere. The transition, in other words, cannot be local. It is global and systemic.

The architecture of what comes next

The years ahead are shaping up to be pivotal for global sustainability governance, with major milestones across climate, biodiversity, and land under United Nations frameworks. The opportunity is unmistakable: to move toward a unified strategy. The challenge is equally clear: overcoming decades of institutional silos. Villars sits precisely at that intersection. Or, as Martin R. Stuchtey, founder of SYSTEMIQ and The Landbanking Group, put it: “The Villars nature agenda is what holds the entire sustainability movement together.”

It is not a negotiating forum, nor a policymaking body. But it is becoming something just as consequential: a place where the financial, intellectual, and strategic foundations of the next phase of the transition are being shaped. If gatherings like Davos reflect the current architecture of the global economy, Villars, perhaps more than any other forum today, offers a glimpse of what might come next: an architecture built not around extraction and growth alone, but around the recognition that nature is the system within which all others operate.

If nature is the future of sustainability, Villars is quietly becoming its home. And that may make a difference.


This article is an independent production by illuminem. The Villars Summit, as well as the individuals mentioned, have no commercial relationship with this work and have not contributed to its authorship. Discussions held under the Chatham House Rule have been carefully respected. In line with our editorial approach, we spotlight and link the protagonists of the sustainability landscape, empowering our global community to navigate and shape the transition.