'Big Bold Brave 2025' Harvard APAC Regional Conference

THE ‘Big Bold Brave 2025’ (BBB 2025), a transformative platform spotlighting opportunities in the fast-emerging Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, concluded recently in Colombo, gathering renowned industry leaders from across the world for future-focused dialogue.

- By Divya THOTAWATTE

Organised by the Harvard Club of Sri Lanka, BBB 2025 was held 12-14 November at Cinnamon Life — City of Dreams, Colombo.

The three-day event began with an exclusive welcome event on 12 November, with the main conference the following day bringing together leaders and delegates from over 15 countries in the region.

The summit featured recognised leaders in business, government, academia, NGOs, and Harvard Alumni who spoke on core challenges and opportunities that will transform the region within the next 25 years. The event included a remarkable lineup of keynotes, panels, case studies, and workshops, helping participants explore opportunities in five topics areas: Education, human capital development, and jobs of the future; Technology, digital economy, and entrepreneurship; Modernising agriculture and food security; Energy infrastructure development and Environment, sustainability, and climate change adaptation.

Setting the tone for the summit’s discussions, day one of the conference opened with a keynote by nature scientist, conservation leader, and Time100 Climate Leader Dr. M Sanjayan who explored how preserving nature was of key economic interest.

Embracing nature as economic strategy

“We stopped treating nature as our planet’s infrastructure. We started treating it as an excess at best and hostile at worst. The cost of that decision is not actually environmental. The cost is economic. It’s national.” Countries that understand nature as economic infrastructure would therefore be the ones to win the future.

Sanjayan said that for the first time in human history, the development and transformations taking place right now were faster than their values, ethics, and nature’s ability to replenish itself. He explained that in this context, humans had severed their bond with nature, and in doing so, built economies on top of the very systems that sustain them.