Walking through the doors of Campus Biotech, past glass walls and greenery spilling in from every side, the building feels alive before anyone's said a word. A fitting welcome for a day about reinventing the systems we depend on. 

That's where UNEP launched the Geneva conversation around GEO-7, its seventh Global Environmental Outlook, published this past December under the title A Future We Choose. The diagnosis is stark: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution have folded into a "triple planetary crisis," and the window to act on it is narrowing fast. The answer the report proposes is a transformation of five interlocking systems: energy, food, materials, finance, and environmental governance. But what set this edition apart from the six before it was more than its diagnosis. For the first time, GEO is solutions-oriented — moving beyond assessment to chart a path for action. That focus went hand in hand with another important shift: GEO-7 built Indigenous Knowledge and Local Knowledge (IK&LK) structurally into the report, through a dedicated task force, dialogues with Indigenous knowledge-holders, IK&LK-related content throughout the report's 21 chapters, and standalone sections running alongside the main text. 

The morning felt more like a conversation than a lecture. After each presentation, the floor opened up, and delegates and researchers from all over the world lined up at the microphones with sharp questions about who pays for transformation, and who decides. "As governments, we can and we should negotiate political choices, but we should not negotiate scientific facts," said Miguel Luís of Portugal's Permanent Mission in Geneva, pressed on where the report's ambition meets political reality. On the finance side, panelists were candid that the price tag behind the report's numbers is real, and that no single sector, public or private, can carry it alone. Nobody seemed to want easy answers, and nobody on stage tried to offer them. 

 The importance of Indigenous Peoples' voices being included in a GEO report for the first time was a thread led by Sarah-Lan Mathez-Stiefel. 

A senior scientist at the University of Bern's Centre for Development and Environment and an associate researcher at the Wyss Academy for Nature, Sarah-Lan coordinated the process that gave Indigenous Knowledge and Local Knowledge its place in GEO-7, as Coordinating Lead Author across all five of the report's IK&LK chapters. She opened by naming how rare that mandate from the United Nations’ members states was: the first time a GEO edition had ever received one. Her case for why it mattered was simple: "Finding solutions to the planetary crisis requires not only the best available knowledge," she said, “but also including different actor’s perspectives in an inclusive process.” That means considering more than science alone, but also the knowledge of "communities and peoples who have established a very long relationship with their environment." 

She walked the room through how that mandate became real: a task force of nineteen Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts and fellows from seventeen countries, four dialogues held directly with Indigenous knowledge-holders, and five standalone chapters she co-authored on Indigenous peoples' relationship to nature, the disproportionate impacts they face, knowledge co-creation, and Indigenous-led pathways forward. 

She shared her learnings just as openly. The task force formed too late to shape the report's early structure and conceptual approach, and Indigenous authorship remained thin. Her recommendation to the room, several of whom will help shape the next global assessment: "move from a perspective of inclusion to one that fosters compensation, mutuality and equal collaboration, from the start." Henri Rueff, coordinating lead author of the report's chapter on the methodology underlying the proposed solution pathways, backed that up moments later: "the solution pathways we offer... is not a recipe. It is very much a framing to guide how processes can be implemented for actions."  

Looking ahead, Sarah-Lan framed it plainly: "the avenue for future sustainability is to center Indigenous biocultural perspectives, governance and science." 

Other speakers picked up threads of their own. Isabel Martínez, of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions, framed the circular economy challenge in a single line: "it's not simply about closing the loop, it's about closing the right loop." Eva-Marie Meemken, food systems economist at ETH Zürich, struck a more hopeful note, pointing to the entrepreneurs she works with across Africa: "we need more investment in local innovations." 

The afternoon carried the same spirit into a closed workshop with selected Swiss-based scientists and multilateral actors, held under Chatham House rules, where four tables worked through how to build partnerships transformative enough to turn knowledge into real, systemic change. 

By the end of the day, something Sarah-Lan said early on had quietly set the tone for everything that followed: better solutions don't come from having the most knowledge, but from recognizing which knowledge has been missing, and finally making room for it. 

The event was co-organized by UNEP, the Geneva Science-Policy Interface, the Geneva Environment Network, the University of Geneva, the Centre for Development and Environment of the University of Bern, the Wyss Academy for Nature, and the Alliance of Biodiversity International and CIAT. Read more about the day and access the recordings and presentations here. 

Article written by Daria Vuistiner