My name is Hugo Warner. I focus on circular and regenerative business, helping you imagine and build the better future that’s waiting for us.
About me
David Attenborough talks about the ‘wonderful recovery’ that we should witness this century.
Shall we make it a reality?
I am working on my role in reinvigorating this planet’s life support systems and expanding everyone’s options for the future. When you think about it hard enough, and listen to your instincts, you’ll realise the alternative scenarios are unthinkable.
I believe business as usual isn’t going to get us there. Quite the opposite. That’s why I am working to help you first imagine - and then build - circular and regenerative models that are proving so hard to get our heads around. I make this a reality by taking a fresh, generous and all-senses approach.
To this job I bring the richness of two decades of designing, delivering and measuring ambitious, high value programmes. From opium licensing in Afghanistan, to building police stations in Congo, to helping C-suites use futurist methods to shake up their worlds, my experience gives me a different skill- and mindset. Thanks to a decade and a half of consulting with PwC/Strategy& I bring rigour and client-centricity to complement a new world mentality.
If this sounds like it coincides with your big plans, let’s talk.
“There isn’t one highway we’re going to travel to the future; we’re all going to be figuring out our way through the forest - so we all need to be able to create.”
What I offer
Let’s connect if you want to:
Use imagination-first strategy that creates a different - and better - blueprint for your business
Unlock and harness the latent demand for circularity in organisation and your customers
Create a provocation, an artefact, or a white paper that tells a powerful story about the change you are making.
I am also interested in sharing what I’m learning from ecological restoration and civic activism, both in urban and rural contexts.
Let’s brainstorm or, if you prefer, connect with me on LinkedIn.
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day I can hear her breathing. ”
Circular and regenerative
The circular and regenerative economy will some day be inevitable. If we get it right, it’s going to be amazing.
But it also seems like an impossibility - right?
It’s as big a shift as moving from the agricultural to the industrial revolution. And, if that weren’t hard enough, it’s one that asks for an artificially fast transition. Incumbents need to self disrupt, startups need to scale, and everyone needs to create a new set of rules. To the extent that businesses recognise this, their reaction is understandably modest: kick the can down the road with industry pacts, non-specific goals, and incremental innovations. At the same time, we know that no amount of finger-wagging, compliance reporting, or guilt-tripping is going to change things.
Something different is needed.
This challenge is what motivates me to help make this regenerative tomorrow something we all get to do, not something we might have to suffer.
Systemic approaches to circular strategy
Business leaders need to world-build the circular future and work out how they will thrive in it.
That’s hard. To help them, I bring a focus on under-explored strategies for businesses that can make the circular economy come true. I’m working on experiential, imagination-led approaches to the circular transition, for example in the form of a General Seminar that I co-created with the Near Future Laboratory, and a future prospectus for forward-looking businesses and institutions.
In the short term, we also need transition models.
These are the ideas and pragmatic solutions that help businesses that bring joy to their customers and help them build momentum for real sustainability. Most recently I have been collaborating with electronic waste compensation pioneer Closing The Loop on just that theme: entry points for bigger, more powerful transformation.
I’m fortunate to be joined in this mission by my colleagues at Circudyne, Untitled Concept and Roos Sustainability Research.
Circularity in Africa
I believe that the African continent will soon become a powerhouse for the circular decentralised business models that the world needs. But I also have a hunch that the best and most successful ones have yet to be created and scaled up or out.
That’s why I work with Footprints Africa, a Ghana-based think tank on circular solutions in the built environment, food systems, and the energy transition. Footprints’ goal is to create 100,000 living wage jobs in the circular economy across Africa over the next five years. I work on emerging business models in regenerative agriculture, electronics, and the built environment, to the state of the circular economy across the continent.
Mentoring circular leaders
I am also an ongoing mentor for the University of Exeter Business School’s Circular Economy Masterclass, which allows me to understand business leaders’ perspectives on their circular transformation.
“No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be... [O]ur statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.”
Nature restoration
We have another big project this century: restoring the rich natural systems that we’ve squandered. It feels so exotic and so ambitious a task as to almost deserve to be called ‘terraforming’.
I believe that sooner or later you’re going to be involved in it.
My projects
I am co-designing an ambitious ecosystem restoration programme in Portugal. Our goal is to make landscape restoration a reality, at scale, by rewiring the economic incentives for people to revitalise rather than degenerate living systems. The possibility of creating a legacy for generations to come that’s abundant and beautiful is almost too exciting. I am lucky to be working on this project with my colleagues at Floresta Nativa and Earthwise Alliance.
I also sow, plant or propagate one tree a day, both as penance and passion. It’s important for me to keep my hands in the dirt and to learn the lessons it teaches me: patience, humility and the complexity of natural systems.
Board memberships
Urbem urban afforestation
I work on the board of Urbem, a project that creates fast-growing Miyawaki forests across Lisbon, where I live. Lisbon needs to turn into a forest city if it’s going to survive in the long term. Miyawaki afforestation brings beautiful results in a shorter timeframe, and brings opportunities to people who are best-placed to steward these forests - that is, the citizens who live around them.
The Salonga Conservation Initiative - helping bonobos
I’m also a member of the board of directors of The Salonga Conservation Initiative (SCI), a US-based non-profit. SCI’s mission is to support conservation and biodiversity initiatives which preserve the rainforest ecosystem of the vast Salonga National Park and landscape in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Salonga is home to the world’s largest population of bonobos, and the largest forest elephant population in Congo. Preserving its natural integrity depends on understanding the dynamic relationship between forests, water, wildlife and humans.
You can discover more on what drove my fascination for the Congo rainforest here.
“Clearly we could devastate the world. If we are not to do so, we must have a plan... As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the Universe where there is life. Its continuing survival rests now in our hands.”
Civic activism
If cities are where we choose to live, how would you make them as wonderful as possible today without storing up even bigger challenges for people of tomorrow?
I’m fascinated by how we can empower people to shape the things that matter to them for the better. I didn’t think of this as ‘activism’ until I received the label from a journalist in 2023.
A couple of years ago, when talking to people in my guerilla allotment in Lisbon, I learned about a proposed ‘mega-urbanization’ project stretching over 48 hectares and involving the construction of some 2,400 dwellings. The city hall, the Câmara de Lisboa, has branded it the ‘biggest urban remodelling operation after Expo ‘98 and Alta de Lisboa’.
In another time that kind of project might feel like progress. But Lisbon is a city which already has 50,000 empty or abandoned houses and an exposure to extreme heat that could make it uninhabitable within the next two decades. Every city in the northern hemisphere has a housing crisis. And Lisbon’s is unjust and untenable. But I believe the solution for the city is not to concrete over the open space that’s left. It lies in rethinking and adapting what’s already been built, and doubling down hard on the green infrastructure that our children will thank us for.
This is why I led an‘alternative public consultation asking citizens what they really want, and to imagine possibilities both for the city’s present-day challenges and long-term liveable future. The results were inspiring and the reactions astonishing. You can read more about them in Le Monde Diplomatique, Lisbon for People, and Público (articles in Portuguese).
“My question is how organizations can lead us not toward some predictable goal, but toward a greater and greater capacity to handle unpredictability, and with it, a greater capacity to love and care about other people.”
