© Loic Juchem
How to advance sustainability in an era of polycrisis was the focus of the Luxembourg Sustainability Forum 2025, with this year's discussions homing in on the critical role of community and collective action.
The Grand Théâtre in Luxembourg City hosted the Luxembourg Sustainability Forum 2025 on Tuesday, an event dedicated to advancing the theme of sustainability within the Grand Duchy.
The forum tackled pressing questions, including how to drive sustainable progress during difficult times and amid overlapping global crises. A central theme of the discussions was the power of community and collective action.
To explore this idea, the forum featured French author and "community explorer" Hugo Paul. The 27-year-old detailed insights from his book, "Faire Tribu" – a conceptual term for forming a community – which documents his year-long experience living in over ten different collectives. These ranged from a monastery and a forest school to a refugee camp, all in an effort to understand the fundamental forces that bind a community together.
Paul explained that his journey began with a deep concern for the ecological crisis at age 18. However, his immersion into various communities revealed a more subtle, underlying issue: a crisis of "us", marked by a widespread inability to collaborate effectively.
His goal, he stated, became to study how people can cooperate more effectively by finding the tools, methods, and inspiration to reclaim this "collective power." He emphasised that a community never arises by chance. It must be intentionally built through shared rituals, mutual responsibility, and clear cohesion.
Paul's own path led him from questioning the sustainability of fossil fuels in engineering school to five years of hands-on involvement in diverse fields of nature and environmental protection.
Paul outlined a multi-faceted approach to driving change, describing his work through four distinct "levers": academic, citizen, economic, and political.
On the academic lever, he trains both students and lecturers on environmental issues. The citizen lever involves bringing together committed young people across France and Europe to share support and develop practical tools from their experiences. Through the economic lever, he founded an initiative to reintroduce deposit-return schemes in universities. Finally, his political lever focuses on convening MPs and senators to draft legislation that would make environmental education mandatory in universities.
After five years of this work, Paul concluded that these are not separate endeavors. He realised that whether political, academic, or citizen-based, every lever is fundamentally a "collective lever." According to Paul, "All of these levers rely on the power of the collective."
His message to the Luxembourgish organisations and businesses at the forum was unequivocal: "Community is the future."
