Letter to our Stakeholders

Dear Reader,

In 2025, the Wyss Academy entered a period of strategic refinement—building on the achievements of its first five years, taking forward lessons from the previous year’s evaluation, and preparing the next phase through focused planning—while continuing its daily work at full speed.

Across diverse landscapes, we pursued a common approach to driving change. We worked with partners to implement and test practical actions on the ground, governed and scaled by coalitions of influential actors and guided by scientific evidence. This interplay between research, policy and practice lies at the heart of our approach: catalyzing systemic solutions to nature–people challenges and enabling added value beyond individual projects.

In Kenya, for example, the Wyss Academy supported the restoration of degraded semiarid landscapes. By combining a well established technique—semi-circular bunds—with governance mechanisms and revenue generation, we enabled rapid scaling from a few thousand bunds to 170’000 by the end of the year. The broader value of the work, however, lay in the Wyss Academy’s catalytic role: bringing together youth and women’s groups restoring soils, scientists and monitoring experts guiding implementation, elders defining governance structures, and private sector actors supporting value creation. This collaboration proved so energizing that local women’s groups invested more than 90 women-years of labor within just a few months—a powerful sign of confidence, hope, and determination to drive change.

In Peru, the Wyss Academy, together with academic partners, public institutions, and the private sector, is advancing an agroforestry incubator that brings diverse knowledge systems together to establish diversified agroforestry plots. This initiative demonstrates that ecological integrity and improved rural livelihoods are not competing objectives but mutually reinforcing outcomes. To monitor biodiversity recovery, we are installing camera traps and audio moths in newly created agroforestry plots, in mature systems, and in comparable control sites. These tools generate solid evidence that well-designed diversified agroforestry can replicate key features of natural forest structure, creating vital habitat for mammals, birds, and other native species. Beyond its environmental benefits, the initiative produces high-quality data that substantiates the socio-economic viability of regenerative agriculture. These insights are already informing discussions on evidence-based public policy and regional land use planning. Ultimately, the incubator provides a clear pathway for sustainable investment that strengthens long-term ecological resilience and supports prosperous rural communities.

These are just two examples among several achievements across our Solutionscapes, our “real-world- labs” in Bern, Kenya, Madagascar, Peru, and Laos, spanning a total of 60 projects. The Annual Report 2025 shares stories from around the world that illustrate how we advance our mission: combining concrete action and governance through Coalitions for Change, and science based guidance.

The reporting year was also shaped by strategic planning for the period 2026 to 2030. Our vision remains highly relevant: we strive for a world in which the relationship between people and nature is both just and mutually beneficial. To realize this vision, we have further refined our goals for the coming years. We remain determined to catalyze systemic solutions to nature–people challenges in our six Solutionscapes and amplify their impact across landscapes, regions, and scales. We are also committed to sustaining our work beyond 2030 and securing the long-term future of the Wyss Academy. To support these ambitions, we have made targeted adjustments to our organizational structure by better aligning roles and resources with our priorities for the coming phase.

The Wyss Academy is well prepared and highly motivated for the next year that marks the start of another 5-year strategic phase. A heartfelt thank you goes to our staff for their extraordinary commitment and excellent work, and to our donors and partners for their collaboration, support, and trust.

Prof. Dr. Christian Leumann, Chairman of the Board

Prof. Dr. Peter Messerli, Director