Monique Kelly - Reflections on the Wao Summit 2026
Deep, strong, interconnected roots create the conditions for resilience.
This is the one lesson I’m taking away from this year’s Wao Summit.
Like in nature, a resilient social landscape is made up of diverse perspectives, communicating and connecting to better understand the multiple challenges we face. No one person or group can tackle the complex, interconnected challenges we’re up against. Our strength lies in the relationships between us.
We are starting to see fissures develop and widen in our society. Underpinning many of these is an energy system that has supercharged our innate human ingenuity and our ability to consume materials and energy at an ever increasing pace.
This leads us to three fundamental questions we addresses throughout the Wao Summit:
What is physically possible? What do the laws of physics and thermodynamics allow?
What can our planet withstand? How far can we push our living systems without transgressing planetary boundaries? Note - we’re in deficit on this one already overshooting seven of the nine boundaries so we’ve got a bit of restorative work to do.
What resources are available to us? What materials and energy will we have access to as supplies become increasingly constrained and insecure?
The speed and scale at which we are churning through energy and materials is putting us, and particularly future generations, in a position where we may have fewer and fewer options to maintain the increasingly complex society we are frantically building.
Energy underpins almost every assumption we hold about our present and future.
As Tim Crownshaw pointed out in the Future of Energy discussion, energy allows us to collapse time and space. Abundant, cheap fossil fuels allow us to be on the other side of the world in a matter of hours. They underpin the infrastructure that brings the wealth of human knowledge to our phones in an instant. A US$90 barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of approximately 4.5 years of human physical labour, which raises the question of what does labour look like in the future?
We are in a pincer between increasingly costly and energy intensive extraction of oil, geopolitical insecurity, and the ecological imperative to leave much of what remains underground.
Think about that for a moment.
Alongside the extraordinary advances fossil fuels have enabled, they have also given us the ability to extract, transform and discard materials at an unprecedented rate. In the process, we have lost sight of the value of those materials, the energy embedded in them and the ecological cost of their extraction.
Houses built today with materials that cannot be recycled or reused become a delayed liability for future generations, with landfill often their only destination.
As we explored during Better Building Day, what if we flipped this on its head and thought of buildings as resource banks for future generations? Buildings designed to be repaired, adapted, dismantled and reused.
That shift in mindset would fundamentally change the way we build.
As would thinking of buildings not as commodities but as habitat and homes for intergenerational living and community building as Dr. Karamia Muller highlighted the values behind housing for Pacifica and Maori.
It all seems overwhelming! Yes but don’t let that put you off.
In the Age of Complexity and Future of Energy korero, we discussed how the interconnected crises we face share a common denominator. Fossil Fuels. The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution, unleashing our capacity not only to churn through existing materials, as discussed by Professor Glenn Banks but also create entirely new ones.
Plastics are one example. As Emeritus Professor Ian Shaw pointed out, even if we stopped producing plastics today, their legacy will remain for centuries, including in the form of microplastics.
The digital age is a subset of the industrial age. It is only possible because of the vast amounts of energy and resources underpinning it. Take those away and technology as we know it is under threat.
Our rapid rollout of AI is a testament to this. We are already seeing material bottlenecks emerge, particularly around the energy, copper and other critical materials needed to power its infrastructure. With servers and particularly high performance chips needing renewal on relatively short cycles, often around three years, the material churn is enormous.
Extend that demand out another three generations and we start to see the limits of our folly.
We cannot build an infinitely expanding digital world on a finite physical planet.
Unpicking these interconnected issues during the Age of Complexity discussion brought us back to one absolute necessity: people need to stand up and put guardrails around how we do things. As Dr. Cathrine Dyer pointed out, community is the solution to increasingly complex challenges as current institutions are not designed to cope with complexity.
From the neighborhood in Sydney challenging the expansion of data centre infrastructure as highlighted by Peter Griffin to the collective voices demanding change and accountability during the mid-term elections in the United States, it is up to every one of us to stand up and take action.
We need to shape the landscape we want to live in.
So what can we do now?
Don’t just think like it. Embody what it means to be nature.
A thread throughout the week was the potential of nature based solutions at personal, landscape and urban level as talked about by Sam Parsons and on the Better Building Tour with Andrés Roa Concha and Marta Redman.
Get skilled up on what it means to be resilient.
Prune back the deadwood in our lives. Not to do more, but to create space to live and enjoy life. To fill our cups and provide us with the energy we need to roll up our sleeves and do some hard stuff.
We need to understand our purpose in the wider ecosystem, strengthen our roots, our connections to place and people, and build a more resilient social landscape.
Just as a forest's resilience lies in the diversity and strength of its relationships, so does ours.
We are only as resilient as the relationships we nurture.
Dr. Denise Quinlan provided us with the space during the Better Business day to play the "What if?" game.
First, to visualise the future we want to create. To establish a North Star we can navigate towards.
Second, to test disruption scenarios and expose the assumptions on which our lives depend.
What if we had to live with intermittent energy?
What if supply chains went down for months?
What if our access to the internet was disrupted?
Playing with possibilities creates the neural pathways to imagine transformative solutions and deal better with disruption. It strengthens our capacity to adapt and identifying where we need to put down deeper roots.
Learn practical skills.
Growing food is prime among them. With an increasingly volatile global climate and an industrial agricultural system so reliant on fossil fuels, strengthening local food production will become an increasingly critical part of our future.
Food Resilience Day demonstrated how the movement towards rebuilding local food systems is already underway. These are the roots of a more resilient food landscape. Dr. Maria Barnes inspired us in her talk about how they are bringing together community to build resilience with iwi in the Hokianga
And a great tip from Larry Blair during the Future of Energy discussion: learn to tinker. Get into the shed. Take things apart. Understand how they work. Learn to repair them and build them back up.
We have become extraordinarily good at consuming and replacing things. We need to become much better at maintaining, repairing and making the most of what we already have.
Why does all this matter?
Very simply, when we return to those first three questions about physics, planetary boundaries and material availability, it becomes clear that if we continue hurtling into the future at our current pace and scale, we are going to hit some serious bottlenecks.
Some are already emerging.
Energy insecurity, material constraints, ageing infrastructure and increasing climate impacts will all put pressure on the systems we have built. And these pressures will not happen in isolation. They will compound one another.
We will feel some of these impacts. But it is our kids, their kids and future generations who will bear the greatest consequences.
Some bottlenecks are probably inevitable now. But getting our heads out of the sand and recognising what lies ahead is critical.
The earlier we recognise the limits, the more choices we, and future generations, have.
We need to buy ourselves time. Slow the pace at which we are approaching these bottlenecks. Reduce unnecessary energy and material demand. Extend the life of what we already have.
And use that time to make strategic, collective decisions about how best to navigate around the constraints ahead.
This is not about retreating from the future. It is about being much more deliberate in how we shape it.
Two final lessons stand out.
We are energy blind. And we are future blind.
We need to understand the energy that underpins our society, the materials it allows us to consume, and the limits we are rapidly approaching. And we need to extend our thinking beyond our own lifetimes.
Which brings me back to where I started.
Deep, strong, interconnected roots create the conditions for resilience.
In nature, resilience comes from diversity, relationships and the ability of living systems to adapt and regenerate. The same is true for our communities.
The roots we strengthen today, the connections we nurture, the knowledge we share and the choices we make will shape the landscape future generations inherit.
And our responsibility extends beyond humanity to the wider living world of which we are part.
The challenge of our time is not whether we have the ingenuity to keep building more, but whether we have the wisdom to recognise when enough is enough, and the courage to choose differently.
It's time to create a legacy, not a liability.