16 Jun 2025
A SYMBOL OF TRAILBLAZING LEADERSHIP
This year’s WIN WIN Award prize cubes, designed by Emeli Höcks, are inspired by the ancient material terra preta and the theme Trailblazing Leadership - symbolising a leadership that restores, unites, and creates conditions for future life.
Designer Emeli Höcks is the creative mind behind the unique prize cubes that will be presented at the WIN WIN Gothenburg Sustainability Award Gala on 18 October 2025. Drawing inspiration from this year’s theme – Trailblazing Leadership – Höcks has designed a sculptural object that embodies the principles of long-term, regenerative leadership: leadership that not only addresses today’s global challenges, but also illuminates a new path towards a more sustainable future.
He is a unifying force for the Amazon
The 2025 laureate is Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai, leader of the Achuar people in Ecuador and President of the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance. Through his leadership, he has successfully united over 30 Indigenous nations across Ecuador and Peru - an area the size of Germany – to collectively safeguard the Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants.
His philosophy is characterized by active listening, building consensus, and far-sighted vision in which every decision must be sustainable for at least seven generations. This ethos deeply informed Emeli Höcks’s design of this year’s prize cube – brought to life through the use of the mythical material terra preta.
A regenerative vision in physical form
Terra preta – Portuguese for "black earth" – is a charcoal-rich soil developed by Indigenous communities in the Amazon over a millennium ago. By combining biochar from low-oxygen combustion with organic matter, they created a soil that does not deplete over time, but rather becomes richer and more fertile.
Today, this ancient practice is being revisited as a modern climate solution. The stable nature of biochar makes it an effective carbon sink, while also enhancing the soil’s ability to retain nutrients and water. In this way, terra preta holds potential for increasing food security and mitigating carbon emissions simultaneously.
“To me, terra preta is a powerful example of how human impact need not be destructive – it can in fact enhance and support the Earth’s own systems.” - Emeli Höcks
A living prize connecting the local to the global
For this year’s prize cube, Höcks has developed a material comprising her own hand-produced biochar, blended with compost soil from the award’s partner, Radisson Blu Scandinavia in Gothenburg. At its core lie grey pea seeds – a hardy, nutrient-rich crop that has been cultivated in Sweden for generations. If the prize cube were to be buried, the material would decompose naturally, allowing the seeds to germinate.
In this way, the cube symbolises the intersection of the local and the global, while embodying the principle of regenerative leadership – one that gives back to the Earth and creates conditions for future life to thrive.
Uyunkar Domingo Peas Nampichkai will visit Gothenburg from 13–18 October to participate in the WIN WIN Week programme and to receive his prize at the WIN WIN Award Ceremony at Börsen.