Presenting the Trillion-Dollar Restoration Economy at START Summit x Hack 2025

Author: Felicitas Belker, Youth Engagement Consultant | April 11, 2025

Group of young people pose in front of START sign at conference

The G20 GLI and ITC team with the YECO participants at START Summit 2025

Photo credit: UNCCD/G20

The G20 Global Land Initiative (G20 GLI) returned to Switzerland on 17 to 21 March 2025 for START Summit x Hack, the largest student-led conference on entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe. As a key partner this year, G20 GLI elevated the message that land restoration is not only an environmental imperative but a trillion-dollar opportunity for a new generation of purpose-driven entrepreneurs and investors.

Over five days in Zurich and St. Gallen, G20 GLI and International Trade Centre (ITC) brought eight ecopreneurs from the Youth Ecopreneur Programme (YECO) to the heart of Europe’s startup ecosystem. Through pre-summit meetings, a flagship booth, stage programming, side events and workshops, the Initiative showcased how land restoration can drive sustainable livelihoods and inclusive growth.

Exploring Zurich’s Startup Scene

Before the Summit, the YECO delegation joined high-impact meetings with leading institutions like Google, Brainforest, the elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization, Restor and Crowther Lab. The sessions connected ecopreneurs to accelerators, impact investors and science-based platforms driving sustainability and biodiversity. Discussions explored investor pitching, venture scaling and integrating cutting-edge science into restoration work.

“These exchanges helped me reflect on how to communicate our ideas more effectively and with greater impact,“ shared Julia Mensa, YECO participant and CEO of Nunatak BioTech.

Young people at Lake Zurich

Group picture in front of Lake Zurich
Photo credit: UNCCD/G20

The G20 GLI Presence at START Summit

At START Summit, G20 GLI hosted a booth in the Sustainability Lounge to feature YECO ventures, spread the G20 GLI’s mission and sparked conversations with founders, investors and policymakers. With a restoration quiz, a popcorn machine and co-branded displays, the booth was a hub for engagement. YECOs reported meeting up to 25 new leads each, with many continuing investor conversations post-summit.

G20 Global Land Initiative stand at START Summit

The G20 GLI’s “A Land of Opportunities” booth at the Sustainability Lounge of START Summit
Photo credit: UNCCD/G20

Reimagining Restoration: From Screen to Stage

A highlight of the event was the keynote speech, Unlocking the Trillion-Dollar Restoration Economy: Entrepreneurship, Technology and Innovation, delivered by Paula Padrino Vilela, Programme Management Officer at the G20 GLI.

Padrino Vilela spoke at the builder stage of the START Summit, and began with a screening of Imagine Land 2040, the first AI-generated short film co-produced by the G20 GLI, UN Volunteers and Tomorrow in Focus.

Padrino Vilela challenged the audience to see land not only as a limited resource but also as the foundation for the growth and resilience of a new restoration economy. “Restoring land is not just about fixing the past. It’s about building the future,” Padrino Vilela stated.

Paula Vilela speaking at START Summit

Paula Padrino Vilela speaks on the builder stage of START Summit
Photo credit: UNCCD/G20

The keynote was followed by a pitch from YECO participant Tonthoza Uganja, founder of Sustainable Farming Solutions, grounding the keynote in real-world impact.

Workshops and Ecosystem Dialogue

G20 GLI hosted two interactive workshops. The first titled, Investing in Tomorrow: Scaling Green Ventures, brought together students, early-stage startups and impact-oriented investors to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing young entrepreneurs, including financial access and emerging trends in green entrepreneurship.

The second, Lens on Tomorrow, co-hosted with Tomorrow in Focus, promoted the film Imagine Land 2040 and explored AI-powered storytelling for sustainability advocacy. Both workshops fostered new dialogues between youth entrepreneurs, investors and development professionals.

julia mensa group discussion
Julia Mensa, CEO of Nunatak Bio, writing down challenges in accessing finance during her group discussion
Photo credit: UNCCD/G20

The G20 GLI at START Hack 2025

As part of its commitment to youth-driven innovation, G20 Global Land Initiative partnered again with START Hack 2025, one of Europe’s top technology and entrepreneurship hackathons.

Running in parallel with START Summit, the event brought together over 600 students from around the world to tackle real-world challenges using cutting-edge tools and creative thinking.

G20 GLI’s challenge for this year focused on the Sahel, one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. The hack case asked participants to explore how geospatial analysis, remote sensing and digital platforms can monitor and strengthen ecosystem health in semi-arid landscapes.

Participants were invited to:

Analyze land cover changes using satellite imagery and environmental datasets;
Build interactive tools to track ecosystem degradation and resilience; and
Propose actionable, tech-enabled solutions aligned with global frameworks like the UNCCD’s Land Degradation Neutrality goals

Over 36 hours, teams worked intensively to design applications from visual dashboards to predictive analytics tools, translating raw data into strategies for real-world impact.

The GLI team provided mentorship and technical guidance throughout the hackathon, ensuring that the solutions addressed the complexity and opportunity of restoring land at scale.

This year’s hackathon reaffirmed G20 GLI’s belief that the future of land restoration is not only ecological but also digital. By engaging developers, data scientists and systems thinkers with land degradation, G20 GLI continues to bridge environmental action with technological innovation.

hackers in front of computers at Start Summit 2025 in Zurich

Hackers working on their hack cases during START Hack 2025
Photo credit: UNCCD/G20

The Road Ahead

G20 GLI’s presence at START Summit x Hack 2025 generated significant momentum across social media, the startup community and policy circles. Over five days, G20 GLI gained 276 new social media followers, reached over 8,000 views on digital content and opened new potential partnerships for its Youth Ecopreneur Programme.

Qoane Mothibeli, YECO participant and CEO of JuliGerm PTY LTD, summarized his experience: “In just one week with YECO and the G20 GLI in Switzerland, I gained more insights and connections than in most of my startup journey. At START Summit, I met founders pushing the boundaries of frontier tech and investors who have shaped my company’s trajectory, making it investment-ready. YECO and the G20 GLI have validated a young founder from an ‘unknown’ country in Southern Africa, reigniting my dreams.”

As G20 GLI continues its mission to restore 1 billion hectares of land by 2040, events like START Summit are critical in building a restoration economy powered by innovation, inclusion and youth leadership.

Stay tuned for our post-event films, founder interviews and behind-the-scenes look at this year’s journey in Switzerland!

Director's Message

The year 2024 was pivotal for the Global Land Initiative. Land degradation and restoration remained prominent on the global policy agenda throughout.

The UN Environmental Assembly, G7 Leaders’ Summit, G20 Environment and Climate Change Ministers’ meeting, and BRICS Leaders’ Summit addressed land degradation and committed to scaling up land restoration efforts.

The European Union passed a new Restoration Law mandating quantitative targets for land restoration. The UNFCCC, UNCBD and UNCCD Conferences of the Parties (COPs), held during the last quarter of the year, reinforced land restoration as a crucial solution to combat land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Building on this favorable policy momentum, the Global Land Initiative continued to develop and deliver a robust program. In collaboration with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), we completed a database on Global Restoration Commitments by countries under the UNCCD, UNCBD, UNFCCC and the Bonn Challenge.

Representing a significant increase in global commitments since 2021, the total global commitment now stands at 1.2 billion hectares, with 30 countries, including 11 G20 members, pledging to restore over 10 million hectares each.

The UNCCD, with financial support from the Global Land Initiative, published the first global restoration economy international report, titled, Investing in Land’s Future: Financial needs assessment for UNCCD. The report defines the private sector’s growing role in land restoration and its potential for creating green jobs.

The study outlines key recommendations to support the growth of the restoration economy, which has an associated market survey valued at $37 billion globally, growing at 8.2% annually and is projected to reach $70 billion by 2031. Together, these studies stressed the need for focused policy action to encourage private sector investment and engagement in the restoration economy.

Working with the International Trade Centre (ITC), the Global Land Initiative launched the first cohort of the “Global Ecopreneurs Program,” training 100 young entrepreneurs from restoration startups. These entrepreneurs received training on improving business plans and pitching to investors. We plan to scale this program regionally to reach 10,000 ecopreneurs by 2029.

Training remained a cornerstone of the Global Land Initiative, with programs on the restoration of mining areas, of urban lands, of lowland-based systems, of drylands and with biosaline agriculture. These trainings consistently attracted more applications than available slots. To accommodate this high demand and broader participation, we also conducted online webinars on these topics, in English, Arabic and French.

The first University Curriculum Course on Sustainable Agriculture for Land Restoration was launched this year. It reached over 400 university teachers, with over 100 trained on implementing the curriculum. A university module on urban land restoration is in its final stages.

Representatives from 25 countries attended the second Global Changemaker Academy for Parliamentarians held in Bonn. With the European Union Restoration Law’s passage, global best practices can now be discussed and adapted to national contexts.

The Global Land Initiative’s visibility surged with participation in the G20 Environment and Climate Change Working Group meetings in Brazil, the COPs of the UNCBD and UNCCD and 7 other international exhibitions. In December, the Initiative, in partnership with Germany’s Federal Museum of Arts and Sciences, opened the Save Land: United for Land Museum Exhibition, the first museum exhibition on land restoration, which will run until June 2025.

Online engagement grew, reaching over 35,000 newsletter subscribers and over 14,000 followers across social media platforms, and a global reach of nearly 400,000. The Global Photography Festival, which attracted 17,000 entries from 154 countries, further boosted visibility.

The Global Restoration Information Hub was launched in July 2024. It is a compilation of globally available data on land restoration from credible sources. The site provides information on global best practices, restoration commitments, best practice legislations, documentaries, restoration actors and other databases.

The Initiative issued a global call for communities and NGOs to submit their restoration projects for small grant support, receiving over 600 submissions from 100 countries. Forty-one projects from XX countries were selected for funding.

[Statement on faith, if the faith report is finalized]

The G20 Global Land Initiative Steering Committee was kept informed of developments through regular communication. It met in July and continues to provide guidance on program implementation. It received the work plan for 2025-26; an exciting period of action is ahead.

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