Image: Mattias Nutt/World Economic Forum
This article is part of:World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
- Indigenous intelligence offers the potential to guide societies worldwide through the rapid changes they are undergoing.
- Despite its potential, indigenous intelligence is too often overlooked.
- At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025, experts explored how Indigenous intelligence can be leveraged to drive innovation, sustainability and integrative global solutions.
As climate change, artificial intelligence (AI) and globalization continue to reshape societies, Indigenous intelligence offers solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, from ethical data governance to climate resilience. Despite its potential, Indigenous knowledge and peoples often remain absent from mainstream discourse on modern solutions to global issues.
At the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2025 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, experts explored how Indigenous intelligence can be leveraged to drive innovation, sustainability and integrative global solutions.
Here are five key lessons they shared:
1. Rethinking our relationship with nature
As the climate crisis intensifies, reframing our relationship with nature has become ever more pressing. Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Munoz, Coordinator of the Earth Elders and member of the Otomi-Toltec Indigenous community in Mexico, underscored the need to re-examine the principles applied in our co-existence with nature, stressing the importance of reciprocity: “We need to bear in mind that we need to live with nature, we need to live with this planet, not from this planet.”
He called on humanity to rethink its place in the world and to listen to nature’s warning signs: “We rationally think that nature cannot speak, but nature is giving us lessons. Nature is speaking, we are not listening. The floods, the fires, now the wind is coming.”
This sentiment was also echoed by Justin Langan, a Métis youth advocate for Indigenous rights: “Going forward, in collaboration, in the intelligent age, there’s a pressing need for this new harmony between man and nature. But the new can only exist in collaboration with the old, and that old is Indigenous ecological knowledge.”
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2. Restoring land, restoring balance
For millennia, Indigenous communities have served as stewards of conservation and ecological restoration efforts, yet their profound expertise remains largely unrecognized. Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, President of the Association for Fulani Women and Indigenous Peoples of Chad, challenged this oversight.
She said: “We have protected nature for thousands of years with our Indigenous intelligence, not artificial intelligence, our Indigenous intelligence is working”.
Cristina Mittermeier, Co-founder of SeaLegacy, reinforced this point, highlighting the proven success of Indigenous-led land management in restoring ecosystems, saying: “Wherever you find an Indigenous community, you find richer biodiversity, therefore better carbon sinks. And whenever the tenure of the land that has been colonized is returned to Indigenous people, even if it’s horribly degraded, using the knowledge of thousands of years, the power of community and ritual, tradition and language, those lands are often restored.”
Expanding on this, Langan, called for greater Indigenous inclusion in global conversations: “Indigenous voices should be a core mechanic of the World Economic Forum because a lot of the solutions and the discussions that we are having here today are key to saving this planet and saving our culture and saving our nature.”
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3. Protecting data ownership
As the world moves towards increased digitalization, concerns over data ownership and privacy are mounting. To highlight the consequences that a lack of individual data rights could have for the broader public, Peter Lucas Kaaka Jones, CEO of Te Hiku Media, drew a parallel between data rights and the Indigenous experiences of land dispossession.
He said: “When I think about how our data is being collected without our permission, I think it’s something that can be akin to the privatization of land. And when Indigenous people were colonized for example, in Aotearoa, we saw many of our people become landless. And if we do not take on board these lessons from the past, it’ll be difficult to understand fully what the digital world could hold for us.”
4. AI and Indigenous data
AI systems rely on data input but often fail to contextualize it in a culturally meaningful way. This gap, Jones argued, presents a unique opportunity for Indigenous communities to reclaim agency over their own knowledge systems.
He said: “Many data scientists do not understand the data that they use to create models, whether that’s machine learning, whether that’s artificial intelligence, whatever we want to call it. But when we recognize the profound ability of community members to understand their own language data, their own cultural data […] we recognize an ability to grow talent within our community.”
Jones also illustrated how Indigenous data can be harnessed by non-Indigenous people to develop resilient and forward-thinking solutions: “What I’ve found in the work that I do, is that teaching computers how to speak Māori and Indigenous language is a way of unlocking culture. It’s a way of unlocking traditional knowledge and applying these principles, values, concepts and those types of things to the way that we make decisions, but also the way that we develop resilience strategies and provide new and meaningful ways of looking at the world.”
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5. Charting a path towards Indigenous-powered innovation
Looking ahead, there’s a great opportunity for Indigenous knowledge to power innovation across multiple sectors.
Jones illustrated this point by spotlighting the role that Indigenous communities could play, for instance, in developing efficient renewable energy systems: “When we think that there are communities that still exist in the Pacific and places that are without electricity, is there an opportunity for us to harness traditional knowledge around where sunbelts are, solar energy, understanding where is geothermal energy an opportunity, where does energy cost less to make, create or develop?”
This perspective was also shared by Langan, who said: “We have so much experience and knowledge about the land, about nature, that we have so much to provide the world, the Western civilization. I think it’s time for them to learn from us.”
To unlock this untapped potential, Mikaela Jade, Founder and CEO of Indigital, invited decision-makers and society to look at Indigenous people from a new lens: “Our people are people that do not just look at the brightness of the stars in the sky, but we also look in the dark places and we have enormous contributions to bring to the business sector.”
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