We are blessed beyond description to live on this planet. All of the collisions and creative destruction of cosmic history have led to the miraculous state of a world that is fit for not only life itself, but for advanced, intelligent life.

For us to come along and have a chance at our complicated 21st century lives, billions of years of history had to play out in just the right way, to allow an uninterrupted chain of evolution, allowing chemical cellular life to evolve into complex organisms capable of thought, inquiry, culture, agriculture, science, and engineering. We do not often enough start conversations about our best possible future or the next steps we should take with this background, but it should drive our thinking.

Right now, we are facing a crisis of our own making. In the 19th century, it was understood that carbon compounds trap heat and could have a “greenhouse effect” in an enclosed space. Emitting too much heat-trapping gas into Earth’s atmosphere would alter the atmosphere and cause it to trap more heat. for more than 50 years, we have understood with great precision how much is too much and have watched the planet heat up, as we cross threshold after threshold of excess pollution.

We must, as a species, as nations, and as communities, come to grips with the horror of the senseless cost and damage being generated by global heating pollution. Below, a run-through from the Active Value Trust Ratings report on pollution subsidies.

The International Monetary Fund has found that global subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to $7 trillion, equivalent to 7.1% of all economic activity, in the year 2022. Subsidies have continued growing, even as all countries are making commitments to reduce climate pollution.

The costs of this massive investment are widespread pollution of air and water, disruption of Earth’s climate system, which further disrupts watersheds, ecosystems, and the habitability of both rural and urban areas. The $7 trillion figure does count some of the underpricing of real-world costs, which result in public expenditures, but it does not count all of the costs of climate destabilization, or embedded costs of unsustainable practices, including use of fossil fuels, throughout our food systems.

For reference:

• The 2022 Global Turning Point report found unchecked climate disruption would cost $178 trillion by 2070.

• The Food System Economics Commission has tracked $147.78 trillion spent on the costs of unsustainable food systems, since April 2016—about $40 billion per day. (Only the US and China have national economies larger than that.)

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission found in 2020 that unchecked climate change would destabilize the financial system and undermine its ability to support the everyday economy.

• In 2021, the Financial Stability Oversight Council issued a similar finding, warning “Climate change is an emerging threat to the financial stability of the United States.”

• In just four months, between September 2024 and January 2025, the U.S. experienced two extreme weather events fueled by global heating that are projected to cost more than $250 billion each (Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles fires), over the coming years and decades, as aftermath and rebuilding play out.

• The total cost of 403 disasters in the U.S. costing $1 billion or more since 1980 is reported to be $2.945 trillion. 17% of that cost over 45 years has been generated in the last 12 months.

Meanwhile, disaster costs in 2025 have already hit record levels. Record costs are putting pressure on insurers, who are raising prices or eliminating coverage altogether, across whole regions. As the Climate Value Exchange reported in October:

everyday activities are able to happen only because businesses, institutions, and individuals, are able to buy insurance of one kind or another. Without that, underlying costs and risks would already make it impossible to afford many things we take for granted. As the pressure on insurers intensifies, the risk of everyday systems coming apart grows.

The current state of energy systems has us, collectively, on the way to nowhere—toward a world in which Nature is depleted, biodiversity collapsing, vital ecosystems and watersheds catastrophically disrupted, and everyday human experience unthinkably more difficult than today.

The 2023 State of the Climate report found that:

By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change…

Uncomforable as it is to think about this, we must. What does a world look like where billions of people cannot survive where they are?

Assessing the ethical and practical implications of climate disruption:

No nation has ever dealt with mass migration on that scale—even if we break down the total number into shares of refugee resettlement proportional to population. For instance, if the number is on the low end (3.3 billion) and the population reaches 10 billion by that time, that is a rate of 33%.

For the United States, with a population of roughly 343 million: A 33% share would amount to around 114 million people that would need to be absorbed; If we consider the U.S. has 4% of the world’s population, that could mean 132 million new arrivals; Using greenhouse gas emissions, where the U.S. is responsible for 12.6% of the global total, would equate to a refugee inflow of 415.8 million—far more than the total population of the country.

All of these are clearly unmanageable numbers, so the only sensible course of action is fast-moving, widespread decarbonization, starting immediately.

Now, there is talk about intentionally polluting the stratosphere “to block out the Sun”, in hopes of reversing or slowing global heating. And it is more than just talk. Venture capitalists are backing start-ups that intend to do this, even while there is a global prohibition on such activities.

It is clear that the same reckless strategy, whereby investors seek to profit from pollution, without taking responsibility for the harmful effects of their activities, will drive decisions about this idea. No one proposing to alter our planet’s atmosphere in this way is proposing to pay for all of the costs and ramifications of the disruptions they will cause to Nature and to human security and experience. The economic and financial logic of polluting industries is to require society and Nature to foot the bill, however devastating that cost might be.

Even if carbon removal and cooling are needed, it is infinitely more sensible to pursue restoration of carbon-rich ecosystems and healthy watersheds, to build the needed cooling effect from those stabilizing planetary systems that make a stable climate possible in the first place. The European Union’s announcement this week that member states have agreed to reduce global heating emissions by 90% below 1990 levels by 2040 is a signal that economy-wide transformation is feasible.

We must ask where we are heading, what kind of world we want to be our legacy, whether we think it is rational, or just, to create conditions in which billions of people must fight against prohibitive conditions just to keep existing day to day. We are blessed beyond description to live on this planet; we must prioritize—in all areas—investments that honor that foundational value, as the foundation for all other value creation.

RELATED

We will have a preliminary open discussion for registered participants on Thursday, December 11, 2025. See below for the updated schedule.

Event details

• Date: Friday, December 12, 2025

• Start time: 9:00 am EST / 14:00 UTC

• Duration: 120 minutes

Register here

Overview agenda

• 30 min - Keynote Speakers

• 30 min - Experts and Moderated Discussion

• 30 min - 2026 Outlook and Emerging Insights

• 30 min - Further informal discussion

Detailed Agenda

Speakers

Speakers, experts, and keynotes will include:

• Lisa Friedman - The New York Times

• Nfamara Dampha - University of Minnesota, Natural Capital Project Leadership Team, Adaptation Indicators Expert Group

• Olav Kjørven - Article 109

• Selamawit Wubet - Global Center on Adaptation

A wider group of experts and leaders will join to contribute to the discussion, and will be listed in the Detailed Agenda linked above.

Thematic Priorities

Ahead of the COP30, Climate Civics issued a policy brief outlining key areas of needed improvement in the cooperative effort to accelerate climate action:

1. Move beyond the idea of “solutions” and shift to a mindset that favors adaptive systems design, so local economies benefit from new financing attuned to local risk reduction and resilience needs.

2. Connect city-level food finance to resilience-building investment in rural communities and agricultural landscapes, using climate banking innovation, multidimensional metrics, and cooperative risk reduction to achieve benefits that compound positive effects, attract further investment, and persist over time.

3. Support civic renewal and revitalization by creating mindful and inclusive civic spaces that elevate stakeholders’ voices and optimize the flow of resources to resilience-building local investments.

4. Establish open information safeguards that recognize the link between decent work, factual information, and human dignity, rights, and agency, to reduce the risk of intrusive or misleading information flows generated by artificial intelligence systems leading to misinformed decisions, preventable costs, and other destabilizing effects.

5. Prioritize a shift away from hidden cost dependency—so that public investments and incentives, economy-wide regulations, and international trade relations, reward investments and activities that prevent harm, reduce risk, and support enhanced shared security and wellbeing.

6. Invest in climate-resilient infrastructure, and leverage its added value to support smart, multiphase planning for diversified, adaptive and sustainable local economies.

Read more

After COP30

Key messages linked to our overall analysis of COP30 outcomes:

• Zero emissions economies need to become standard before 2040; this was not formally agreed.

• Adaptation and resilience measures can reshape economies to be climate-secure—if emissions are successfully reduced; Belém progress needs activation.

• Food systems hold trillions of dollars in poorly spent capital; future COPs need more progress on transformation.

• Future economic security for all nations will depend on going well beyond what was agreed in Belém.

Overall COP30 coverage

Toward the Resilience Economy

From the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report Transcending Crisis:

Decent work and dignified inclusive processes are the foundational design elements for a livable future. Give more people greater agency, in real terms, with everyday benefits to health and wellbeing, and we can achieve a world free from deprivation, conflict, and chaos.

From the Climate Civics report on COP30:

The most common sense approach to future investment, governance, and geopolitics, is to lead in securing a climate-resilient future for every community, nation, and sector of the economy. The Mutirão—the cooperative engineering of a climate-resilient future—must be much more than hopeful language; it must play out as a real-world cooperative endeavor to raise ambition, spark the climate-resilient economy everywhere, and secure a livable future.

Preliminary Open Discussion

• Date: Thursday, December 11, 2025

• Start time: 9:00 am EST / 14:00 UTC

• Duration: 60 minutes

• Registration is good for both sessions

Register to attend

What galvanized the American war effort, and made it possible to win both of those wars on foreign soil—brutal wars against highly industrialized, organized, and ruthless enemies, who would kill millions before it was over—was the commitment to fundamental human rights and the principle that governments work in service of sovereign people, not the other way around.

That the Axis Powers ran sadistic detention camps for slave labor and mass extermination made the cause all the more clear, and obviously existential. In Europe, existentialist philosophers admitted that we had not moved beyond good and evil, as many had hoped modernity would allow; they too would join the resistance of free people against ruthless evil. Free people would not be compelled by mass murderers to become slaves forced to support their own destruction.

Acts of heroic self-sacrifice and determined national defense, in the midst of attempted extermination, sparked a spirit of shared purpose. The brave sailors, soldiers, and other service people who resisted the bombardment at Pearl Harbor, or risked their lives to aid and rescue the wounded, deserve recognition and praise beyond what we can commonly conceive in our time.

The attack on Pearl Harbor came just 76 years after the end of the Civil War. Some would live through both wars. From 1941 through 1945, the American people would consciously fight to defend the principles laid out in The Declaration of Independence—that all people are created equal, entitled to dignity and security and the real protection of universal rights, which no power can legitimately reduce or extinguish.

That is the meaning of “unalienable”. No human being can be separated from their natural rights by any legitimate authority. That principle would later be enshrined as foundational national law, in the Ninth Amendment, which requires all who wield power in the United States to recognize and honor even those human rights that are not written explicitly into law.

Though fighting to uphold the rights of people in Europe, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere, to live free from violent tyranny, the Second World War was fought to defend The Bill of Rights. This is why in the aftermath of the war, the U.S. would lead a global effort to establish instruments of collaborative development, shared security, and open democracy.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” and that “human rights should be protected by the rule of law”.

The United Nations was founded to manifest this vision of cooperation in service of human freedom, peace, and dignity. Its Charter opens with the words “We the Peoples” and recognizes a shared purpose:

to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war… to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom…

These were historic achievements for building the foundation for shared peace and prosperity. The shared goal—given that, in the three decades since 1914, two global wars and the hunger and disease outbreaks they set in motion, had taken more than 130 million lives—was to create, together, a future in which human rights and freedoms supersede any of the whims of those who wield power.

What the soldiers, sailors, and other service people who faced the terror of unprovoked aerial war at Pearl Harbor, demand we recognize is that the fundamental rights of free people are protected by the rule of law constraining the whims of those who would use power to harm others. Lawlessness in government is not only a sign of weakness; it is weakness of the most insidious and perilous kind, the kind that breaks nations and shatters their people’s plans for the future.

Leaders that embody and exhibit strength, and who deserve positions of leadership and the trust that allows them to wield power with legitimate authority, are loyal to the essential and transcendent human dignity of all people. They recognize that if they allow unlawful aims and actions to infiltrate their way of using public office, they weaken their country and betray their fellow citizens.

To be an American patriot, one must in one’s way resist and oppose authoritarianism, cruelty, corruption and lawlessness in public office. To be true to the spirit of 1776, 1865, and 1941, one must work intentionally to extend the spirit of the second half of the 20th century, in which the recognized global goal was to make the world safe for human rights and freedoms.

For much of the history of the American democratic republic, violent extremists intent on creating a totalitarian race-based theocracy have waged a low-grade terrorist war against the American people and their system of self-government—both before and after the Civil War. We must recognize how absolutely illegitimate is any person or entity that shows affinity for those violent extremists and their aim of subverting the rule of law and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

President John F. Kennedy—himself a veteran of the Second World War—called the United Nations “our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace”. We do well today to hear Kennedy’s call for “a beachhead of cooperation [to] push back the jungle of suspicion… a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.”

The COP28 in Dubai, in 2023, not only committed nations to “transitioning away from fossil fuels” but also expanded the Paris Agreement’s commitment on ecosystems, recognizing the importance of:

ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, including in forests, the ocean, mountains and the cryosphere, and the protection of biodiversity...

As climate disruption gets worse, it is increasingy urgent that we turn that recognition to action. To ensure the integrity of all ecosystems in forests, the ocean, mountains, and the cryosphere, while protecting biodiversity, requires a level of climate action ambition beyond what any nation is currently envisioning.

Scientific evidence points to the glaring reality: without healthy ecosystems, without sufficient water, without intact mountain landscapes and a stable and reliable cryosphere, we will struggle to produce enough food for our still growing global population. A society without sufficient food is one that cannot maintain a functioning everyday economy.

Societal unraveling is likely closer than most people realize. We have moved beyond the time when the idea that wealth alone can provide protection against unchecked global change. The 2023 State of the Climate report found that:

By the end of this century, an estimated 3 to 6 billion individuals — approximately one-third to one-half of the global population — might find themselves confined beyond the livable region, encountering severe heat, limited food availability, and elevated mortality rates because of the effects of climate change...

Confined... beyond... the livable region...

A world in which billions of people cannot survive where they are is a world in which billions of people are fighting to survive, while seeking a new place to make a living and defend their family’s right to exist. Imagine a world where ten times the population of the United States is on the move, desperate for safety and opportunity, and equipped with technologies decades beyond what marginal communities can access today.

No nation has ever dealt with mass migration on that scale—even if we break down the total number into shares of refugee resettlement proportional to population. For instance, if the number is on the low end (3.3 billion) and the population reaches 10 billion by that time, that is a rate of 33%. For the United States, with a population of roughly 343 million:

• A 33% share would amount to around 114 million people that would need to be absorbed;

• If we consider the U.S. has 4% of the world’s population, that could mean 132 million new arrivals;

• Using greenhouse gas emissions, where the U.S. is responsible for 12.6% of the global total, would equate to a refugee inflow of 415.8 million—far more than the total population of the country.

• Each of these are clearly unmanageable numbers, so the only sensible course of action is fast-moving, widespread decarbonization, starting immediately.

We are living now in a crucial moment of choice, as multiple layers of international crisis come together to form a multidimensional polycrisis. The combined weight of climate disruption, pandemic ripple effects and wider public health crises, conflict, trade and protectionism, income inequality, the need for integrated solutions to thorny problems, and stresses on public budgets, not only degrades human security, but is driving a breakdown in trust that makes it harder to solve even routine problems.

Meanwhile, costs are mounting, fast. Beyond the $7 trillion per year spent to subsidize polluting energy systems, the world economy is bleeding $40 billion every day through unjust, unhealth, unsustainable food systems. The Food System Economics Commission finds we are spending about $15.43 trillion per year—a rate of waste that adds up to $607 billion from the opening of the COP30 on November 10 to this presentation on Nov 25.

Only the United States ($30 trillion) and China ($19 trillion) have annual economic output (GDP) of more than $15 trillion. The next three countries combined (Germany, Japan, and India) have combined GDP of less than $14 trillion. Fiscal stability and security—at local and national levels—are at risk if we cannot get this pervasive systemic waste under control.

The EAT-Lancet Commission makes clear in its 2025 report: We can transition to food systems that are healthy, sustainable, and free from this devastating cost and waste. Doing so would improve lives and livelihoods, and would contribute to stabilizing our relationship with the climate system, possibly preventing much of the societal breakdown we are baking into our future.

An important breakthrough in the COP30 round of climate negotiations was the emphasis on multilevel climate governance. Local authorities working with regional governments, supporting locally rooted human development, can strengthen national climate action planning and implementation. Nations working together can enhance their collective capabilities.

The City Food Finance Principles point to high-value options for aligning budgets, investing in communities, improving health and wellbeing, and reducing fiscal stress:

1. Common Reality – Health-building, nutritious, sustainably produced food should be an affordable, accessible everyday option for all.

2. Delivering Impact – Cities deliberately play the role of impact investor, to shape healthy, sustainable food environments.

3. Urban-Rural Feedbacks – Cities work with surrounding rural areas to support convergence of consumption, production, and incentives.

4. Multilevel Cooperation – Cities engage with regional and national authorities to support enhanced implementation of national climate, food, health, and biodiversity plans.

5. Co-Investment – Cities engage proactively to shape and mobilize investment partnerships linked to a broader Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation.

6. Tracking and Labeling – Cities act as critical intermediaries to support needed data systems integration and multidimensional metrics.

The COP30 gave us a breakthrough commitment to prioritize and safeguard information integrity. To ensure more people have access to the benefits of the best available science, we must not only establish open information safeguards, but ensure information systems recognize the links between human rights, factual information, and human dignity and decent work—all of which are part of the process of avoiding underinformed decisions, preventable costs, and other destabilizing effects.

How this information filters down to the community level and into local economies will shape the fate of nations, including the ability of national governments to honor their legal obligation to prevent climate danger, as outlined in the landmark Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice. It will also shape the ability of communities, regions, and nations, to drive progress for their people in line with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

During the guest lecture, we invited students to outline projected future conditions, considering the above and responding to three motivational questions:

1. What will the world, or your community, be like in 2040? (Outline either Good with Bad or All Good scenarios.)

2. How can we get more of the Good? Back-casting from 2040 conditions, what action steps, policies, and innovations will move us from where we are to that better future?

3. How can we measure non-financial value and co-benefits, to drive this change?

Some of the insights students shared after their group exploration of future conditions were:

• Protecting wildlife, ecosystems, and biodiversity will have significant long-term benefits for human health, security, and prosperity.

• AI systems are growing fast. While this could be a hindrance to sustainable development, we should intentionally design and develop AI systems to be resource-efficient and to favor good outcomes for the health of people and Nature.

• AI systems will also need to be developed to avoid using toxic chemicals that can pollute air an water.

• Communities will have to proactively safeguard public “third spaces”, lest they be taken over by private interests; conservation can be both an urban and rural priority.

• Metrics for measuring progress should include health outcomes, pollution of air and water, carbon emissions and carbon sequestration.

• Cities and communities can play a leadership role, responding to and budgeting for local environmental health and climate resilience needs.

• Communities should have cleaner air, more reliable access to fresh water, and a greater diversity of services, based on Earth systems insights and supporting human security and resilience. ​

This reflection from the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report, Transcending Crisis, echoes much of the discussion of our future prospects for safe, secure, sustainable and shared prosperity:

Climate disruption is ongoing and getting worse, fast. Costs are piling up, and most institutions and communities are falling behind in terms of needed new infrastructure and business models to sustain local goods and services. This is affecting prices, readiness, resilience, and the innovation and adaptive capacity needed to navigate this time of polycrisis. Such costly inertia damages public trust and creates further political complications that slow or block urgently needed reforms.

Recognizing this aspect of the political trust dynamic is essential to finding the solutions that work in local context, to allow communities to thrive despite proliferating risks and costly destabilizing impacts. We need to get beyond the idea of “solutions” and shift to a mindset that favors adaptive systems design. That would mean local economies benefit from new financing attuned to local risk reduction and resilience needs. Such local economies also benefit from a wider range of activities being locally relevant, investable, and sustainable over time.

The Resilience Economy is an immense opportunity—to avoid senseless preventable harm and cost and to establish upgraded industrial and commercial systems that consistently add to the running reserve of resilience value on which all other value creation is founded. The key is to get started without further delay and to make sure we are making real progress.

Even if we stop global heating, restore degraded lands, waters, and ecosystems, and return to better than 1.5°C, adaptation and resilience measures would still be a practical, moral, and economic necessity virtually everywhere. What is missing from the discussion is the basic understanding by policy-makers, investors, and industry that this is not a choice. The money and opportunity will either be invested wisely to achieve collective climate rescue, or it will be sacrificed to an ever-worsening polycrisis.

Markets, whole economies, political systems, and our planet’s climate and biosphere, are all being distorted, to allow a specific way of doing business to win out against more efficient and effective competitors. The costs of this manipulated market dynamic are so pervasive and enormous it is almost impossible to describe them in standard economic language.

Unsustainable practices in food systems, made worse by climate disruption, are bleeding the world economy of roughly $40 billion per day, and leading to millions of deaths per year. Climate pollution is destabilizing ecosystems and watersheds and claiming millions more lives through air pollution.

As we sift through the adopted negotiating texts that form the Belém Political Package, we see eight specific areas that will need urgent attention in the months ahead:

1. Rapid reductions in global heating pollution are needed, to avoid future risk, harm, and cost. Reshaping energy systems to meet a zero pollution standard is urgently needed.

2. Transformation of food systems is needed to support agroecological and regenerative land use, improved human health, and long-term fiscal stability.

3. Multilevel climate governance must become the mainstream norm, across the world, with local, national, and international efforts reinforcing each other.

4. Indicators of successful Adaptation and Resilience need to be activated, localized, and linked to finance, trade, and incentives.

5. Climate-resilient infrastructure and adaptive design and capacity are needed everywhere; they cannot be an afterthought or a luxury.

6. To ensure these priorities are being met, stakeholders need to play a functional role in the development of multilevel climate policies, through open cooperative climate civics.

7. The health and resilience of ecosystems, watersheds, and biodiversity, are essential to overall security and prosperity.

8. Information integrity and continuous, precise, reliable, cross-referenced, and evolving Earth science observationsis essential to success in all areas and regions.

It is particularly important that climate-related policy and commerce make urgent progress in understanding the value of investment in the most vulnerable. The sooner we reduce serious climate risk to zero, the safer we will all be.

Trillions of dollars are already being spent on fossil-fueled climate disasters, without those expenditures being tied to value-builing adaptation and resilience. Some of the most valuable real estate in the world is becoming uninsurable, even as banks, cities, counties, and nations depend on those underlying claims of value to shape and sustain their own finances.

It is unaffordable to continue business as usual. The resilience imperative is systemic and built into all areas of human activity. Rapid business-model change is coming. Polluting industries need to get serious about a future without pollution.

The countries, companies, and financial institutions that develop the adaptive, clean, innovative business models needed to thrive without climate pollution, will be the beneficiaries of the new efficiencies those practices build into everyday experience. To jump start the resilience economy national and local governments should:

1. Set clear national standards that prioritize investments in co-benefits that reduce geophysical danger and support enhanced human security.

2. Shift subsidies away from destructive practices toward practices that deliver similar primary benefits (clean energy vs. polluting, for instance) while also delivering a range of value-building co-benefits.

3. Incentivize major investment in resilience-focused enterprise and innovation, rather than large, resource-intensive industries that might provide only marginal benefits.

4. Support local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that provide risk reduction and resilience services at community and regional levels.

5. Guide commercial banks in providing services that help those resilience-building SMEs grow, serve more people, and improve quality of life at scale.

6. Work with international partners to establish fiscal resilience cooperative frameworks, to make it easier to reallocate capital quickly to the resilience economy.

Full COP30 report

Climate Civics and the Climate Value Exchange will host a Resilient Prosperity Forum event to mark 10 years since finalization of the Paris Agreement, on Thursday, December 11, 2025. The virtual meeting will engage key climate leaders, experts, and stakeholders in discussion of the formal outcomes of the COP30 round of UN Climate Change negotiations, along with a look at areas of emerging opportunity.

Learn more & register

The UN Climate Convention sets the goal of preventing dangerous human-caused interference with the climate system. The Paris Agreement gives us a series of overlapping goals that are part of that shared purpose:

• Limit global heating to 1.5ºC;

• Work towards successful adaptation;

• Share resources, including finance, science insights, and technology, to foster climate-resilient development;

• Align with the Sustainable Development Goals while doing this, to make the overall process more successful.

The Science-Based Targets Initiative has helped to combine these overall aims into a widely accepted idea of “net zero in line with 1.5ºC of global heating”. This has been useful for designing better climate policies and long-term development strategies, and for comparing national and sectoral strategies.

Slow progress on global decarbonization means the costs of climate disruption—in terms of human safety and wellbeing and in terms of financial stability and future opportunity—are getting worse, quickly, and will soon be unmanageable for most, if not all nations. This is now the implicit challenge that everyone recognizes—however they talk about it, and which will face negotiators at the COP30 in Belém.

Another way of stating this implicit challenge is to ask about the future as, what the COP30 Presidency calls a “continuous chain of action”. Stating a global goal is asking the community of nations, and all of the communities within nations, to bend the conditions of the present toward a future that will have specific characteristics. How are we futuring our world, day to day, and what is the core idea driving us?

The answer to this question should be full of common sense. What makes more sense to pursue, if you are facing danger? What makes less sense. Where is the balance? What does success look like when something is unfolding around you that puts everything and everyone at risk, in an ongoing way?

On the eve of the opening of the COP30, Prof. Mizan Khan, a long-time climate negotiator (and guest instructor in our Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops), called for “an expansive interpretation of adaptation as a global public good”, arguing:

Many examples illustrate that funding adaptation brings both direct and indirect global benefits—bio-physical shifts in ecosystems and species, transboundary river pollution, trade disruptions, financial instability, increasing human displacements, etc. Addressing these issues through adaptation provides benefits at all scales.

We must consider the mission to prevent danger in light of the real-world harm and cost already falling on innocent people around the world. According to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine—one of more than 70 institutions participating in the 2025 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change:

climate inaction and continued dependence on fossil fuels is resulting in an immense human cost, with millions of lives lost each year due to heat, air pollution, disease spread, and worsening food insecurity.

Specifically:

• Heat-related deaths averaged 546,000 per year between 2012 and 2021, and heat is causing the spread of other threats to human health, including pathogens, extreme weather, and strain on nutritious food supplies.

• “[U]nhealthy diets contributed to 11.8 million diet-related deaths worldwide in 2022, which the authors say could largely be avoided by transitioning to healthier, climate-friendly food systems.”

• “An estimated 160,000 premature deaths are prevented each year due to reduced coal use and cleaner air, particularly in high income countries.” (This number could be greatly improved with a global transition to clean energy.)

The Convention mandate helps point us toward the common sense answer: Prevent danger.

• For more than three decades, the world has explored the meaning of that simple idea through two main channels: Mitigation (reducing the threat) and Adaptation (changing conditions to make ourselves safer, where we cannot mitigate).

• We are living with dangerous climate interference now. It is an increasingly important part of our present circumstances, and it is shaping living conditions and future prospects for communities and for nations, as we speak.

• It is essential that we follow scientific evidence and act toward science-informed goals that will allow us to remove risk and prevent danger, soon enough to make a better future possible.

• It is also, however, important that our overarching goal of preventing danger be more than an abstraction, that it translate into safety, security, rights, and dignity, for people everywhere.

Technical goals need to operate in service of that higher standard. Preventing danger needs to be an everyday, ongoing, shared goal, guiding us toward better efforts and better outcomes. The simplest, clearest, most universally actionable way to infuse the preventing danger mission into everyday life and business is to adopt a standard of zero harm—to cause zero preventable harm to people or ecosystems.

This is not simply a just transition message of: Transition quickly, but not in ways that might harm people dependent on the status quo. We need a just transition, but we need zero harm to be a universal standard, setting priorities for public officials at local and national levels and for industry, innovators, campaigners, and for the courts that must uphold the right to a future free from climate damage.

The work of distilling thousands of proposed adaptation indicators down to around 100 is coming together. Soon, nations, communities, and financial institutions, will be working to value performance against those indicators; many already are. It is important that all involved recognize both the underlying legitimizing standard of zero harm, as well as the endless diversity of local circumstance that requires translation of global metrics.

The COP30 opened with a series of high-level events centered on the them of Elevating Adaptation by Unleashing the Power of Technology. The opening day’s events included:

• The Belém Declaration on Hunger, Poverty, and People-Centered Climate Action;

• A commitment by multilateral development banks and the Climate Investment Funds to invest in accelerated adaptation and resilience measures;

• A Green Digital Action Hub and commitment of $2.8 billion to innovation in agriculture and food systems;

• RAIZ – The Resilient Agriculture Investment for net-Zero land degradation, to restore degraded lands.

The COP30 Presidency described the moment this way:

Day 1 of COP30 marks a turning point for adaptation and technology. Multilateral development banks and partners unveil new tools and financing models to turn adaptation plans into bankable, scalable projects, while a multi-billion-dollar agricultural innovation package is launched to help farmers in vulnerable regions adapt and thrive. In the afternoon, leaders from government, business, and the digital sector launch the Green Digital Action Hub, a global platform to drive a greener, more inclusive digital transformation.

Complications in this drive for enhanced access to actionable information include the rise of AI platforms, which hold promise and also create risks, and questions of open access and the many connections between technology and human rights. It is clear more people need good and useful information, and that access cannot require any trading away of basic rights.

So, principles are needed, and they need to attach to an overarching frame of reference for what success looks like. One of the tasks for the new AI Climate Institute will be to support development and adoption of standards and practices that prioritize quality of life benefits to vulnerable communities, while reducing the incentive for rapid deployment of unproven or error-prone systems.

Our relationship to Nature needs work sustainably. That work needs to be ethical, science-informed, and cooperative, and we need to move quickly to reduce harm caused by outmoded industrial systems that seek to exploit but not safeguard natural systems. As the UNDP report on the Nature Relationship Index found:

• We need ecosystems that are thriving and sustainable.

• We need societies that understand and honor the irreplaceable value of living systems, even as they interact with and make use of what Nature provides.

• We need safeguards that prioritize zero harm to people and to natural systems.

To empower people across the diverse range of human experience, to adapt successfully, and to prevent danger and establish conditions for successful climate-resilient development, the zero harm standard must begin to play a constant role in the work of imagining the best possible future and working toward it, together.

As we noted at the end of the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report Transcending Crisis: Invest to improve lives and livelihoods:

Give more people greater agency, in real terms, with everyday benefits to health and wellbeing, and we can achieve a world free from deprivation, conflict, and chaos.

Zero harm is the transformational goal. Everything else can be weighed for efficacy, legitimacy, and co-benefits on that scale.

1. It is too big and complex a challenge; climate disruption is not a one-dimensional problem, where any one smart solution can complete the task.

2. Beyond that, both the climate system and the industrial systems that are disrupting it—energy, agriculture, transportation, waste, and manufacturing—touch nearly every aspect of human experience.

3. If the ten richest countries in the world, or the ten largest economies, or half the population of the world, but not the largest industrial economies, does everything right, pollution from the rest of the world will continue to add to the chemical disruption of Earth’s atmosphere and ocean. And yet, we need that cooperative action.

4. We are living with serious climate impacts that will persist, even after we stop making the problem worse.

Add to all of this the fact that there are serious challenges in creating enforcement mechanisms that will compel all industrial-scale actors, small farming communities, and governments, to do the right thing. The climate crisis can be successfully addressed, but achieving that will require something more complicated, participatory, and imaginative than simply adopting a new law, spending money, or deploying a miracle technology.

We need technologies; we need good policy; we need coherent, good faith regulation of polluting industries; and, we need investment. But none of these is sufficient on its own. We also need communities to have access to the benefits of the best available science—both the climate risk insights and the technologies and practices that can reduce that risk to zero, wherever possible.

We also need to go beyond solutions. We need adaptive design thinking—oriented toward adaptive management of future risks and shock events, and toward the likely need to adjust course, innovate, and rapidly re-orient policies and investments to avoid maladaptation.

The United States is facing record disaster costs this year linked to industrial climate disruption. Those costs have been rising for decades, intensifying especially in the last 10 years. Between September 2024 and January 2025, a span of just four months, just two major disasters—Hurricane Helene and the Los Angeles fires—caused enough damage to eventually cost $250 billion each, over the coming 10 to 20 years.

Staple crops on which farming communities and everyday consumers depend are failing in regions as diverse as Pennsylvania and Osun State, Nigeria. Floods, droughts, and fires, are affecting regions as diverse as the Hindu Kush, New Jersey, and Siberia.

These climate impacts are not just an inconvenience for the affected communities and regions. They are infusing added cost into food prices, and projecting disaster-response costs across the whole economy. Meanwhile, most governments have no coherent national plan for addressing the problem of these proliferating cost of proportional climate risk.

As the community of nations gathers in Belém, Brazil, to hash out the next stage in cooperative climate crisis response, these adaptive design questions must inform negotiations:

1. Is public policy delivering funding and capability to local communities, to prepare for, reduce the risk of, and emerge quickly from shock events?

2. Are public investments supporting marginal, underserved, and vulnerable communities, to reduce overall systemic cost and impact?

3. Are climate and weather data systems being fine-tuned to provide real-time early warning and scenario tracking services?

4. Have interagency and multijurisdictional cooperative mechanisms been developed and deployed, to allow for rapid adaptive management?

5. Are intermediary services available locally to support vulnerability-sensitive risk reduction, insurance, and resilience-building?

As noted in the final line of the Transcending Crisis report:

Give more people greater agency, in real terms, with everyday benefits to health and wellbeing, and we can achieve a world free from deprivation, conflict, and chaos.

This week, Mary Robinson and Álvaro Lario write in The Irish Times that “Women feed much of the world – producing as much as 80 per cent of food in developing countries,” and yet:

A recent FAO study found that female-headed rural households in low- and middle-income countries lose about $53 billion (€46 billion) more each year than male-headed households due to heat stress and floods combined. That is not only a loss of livelihoods but of education, nutrition and opportunity. Rural women are absorbing the risks that the financial system has failed to price – or to mitigate.

Ensuring women farmers—especially those working at small scale, who are intensely vulnerable and under-resourced—have greater climate-related financial and adaptive capacity support can stabilize local economies, minimize climate impact costs, and improve everyone’s chances of sustainable prosperity.

The international community also faces a particular additional roadblock: fiscal strain and stress limits what many governments are able to commit to. In both industrialized and developing economies, vulnerability-sensitive debt restructuring is necessary to create sufficient fiscal space to address worsening climate risk and impacts.

All of this adds up to a particular kind of design challenge:

• Effective climate policies cannot be a simple one-time upgrade to an existing policy or program.

• They need to create an operational context in which continuous adjustment, refinement, and innovation, are expected needs to which resources are assigned.

• Agencies need to admit they cannot know exactly what needs will be most pressing in any given future year, and yet provide the means of responding appropriately.

• In many countries, this will test the budgeting process, which can be highly political or involve entrenched interests.

• One way to add agility is to invest in multilevel governance—allocate more resources to local communities and regions, to support locally rooted planning and relevant adaptive capacity.

Finally, the complex creative process of technical innovation needs support locally, regionally, and nationally. This will entail likely missteps and complications, but ongoing investment to drive local innovation and uptake of new practices is a better use of resources than comprehensive maladaptation or simply letting disasters do their worst.

Three more details need to inform decision-making around public finances and cooperative investment platforms:

1. All the money in the world is at stake. If the mainstream financial system fails—as the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Financial Stability Oversight Council have both projected—so will even the richest nations. Economy-wide climate investments are a wiser choice than worsening pervasive risk and cost and overall system failure.

2. We need a coalition of the willing to do everything possible to spread adaptive design thinking, planetary health and resilience insights, and the metrics, tools, and innovations needed, through multidimensional cooperative activities—even if they cannot “solve” the climate crisis on their own.

3. Treat local communities as insight-generators, not just as beneficiaries. Because the climate puzzle is not a one-dimensional challenge, there is a constant need to learn from both failures and successes. The more information we have about what works and what doesn’t, and why, the better prepared we will be to design better, adapt faster, and avoid unmanageable crisis and cost.

1. We are all future-builders.

2. Health is a fabric of wellbeing and value.

3. Resilience is a baseline imperative.

4. Leave no one behind.

5. Design to transcend crisis.

6. Maximize integrative value creation.

In 2025, we are focusing on the principle Design to transcend crisis. The implication is that we need to consider not only how to emerge from shock events for the moment, but work toward making them less likely, and so transcending the systemic drivers of crisis that made those shock events happen. Transcendence as a goal entails both prevention of future crisis and resolution of ongoing crises, including with consideration for interactions between distinct areas of risk and harm.

Restoring Trust

Seven dimensions of polycrisis

In a policy brief to the 4-year stocktake on progress from the United Nations Food Systems Summit, Climate Value partners Climate Civics outlined seven dimensions of polycrisis. Before we can examine what it means to design solutions that reduce risk and create conditions where crisis is less likely, we need to examine those interacting and compounding dimensions of polycrisis.

There are at least five major currents of crisis which constitute destabilizing disruptions on their own and which combine and compound into an ongoing polycrisis. Crosscutting concerns mean at least seven dimensions of interacting crisis are making solutions more elusive: Climate, pandemic, conflict, trade and protectionism, income inequality, the need for integrated solutions to thorny problems, and stresses on public budgets.

Seven Dimensions

Unsustainable Investment is Waste

The 2024 Reinventing Prosperity report included a long list of insights for living through a time of risk and fragility. One stands out above all, as we see the ill-advised investment in destructive practices creating ripple effects that degrade value and security for everyone:

Unsustainable investment is waste. There is widespread agreement that investing in activities that cause harm is wasteful. By reconfiguring value considerations to account for preventable harm and reward sustainable practices, the overall pool of wealth flowing into human enterprise, community-building, and wellbeing can grow, creating an economy that is more abundant, with more good for all.

Preventable Costs

Local Investment

We renew the core questions from the 2024 Reinventing Prosperity report:

1. How multifaceted and fine-tuned are the metrics used by decision-makers to determine whether a given choice increases or erodes overall resilience?

2. Are incentives that shape flows of new investment putting destructive or sustainable practices first?

3. Are institutions—in the public, private, multilateral, and philanthropic sectors—engaging with stakeholders to determine which options are best suited to improve health and wellbeing for people and for the natural systems that sustain life?

It is possible to orient public policy and investment to maximize routine investment flows into local communities. Those large-scale actors that can compete across a wide landscape, and provide quality service to diverse groups of people, can easily capitalize on public development strategies that push capital into communities, making the overall market bigger and more competitive.

Capital to Communities

Food Systems

Getting local means getting concrete, focusing on specific needs and priorities, capacities and risks, and then using that combined insight to put in place solutions that work not only for practitioners and investors, but for the whole community. This is where sustainable development and localizing financial innovation come together.

In our times, we face an unprecedented threat to sustainable food systems: Extractive processes, operating at industrial scale, are destabilizing the climate system and eroding watersheds and natural landscapes. This has the effect of not only making agriculture more difficult, but making it possible that nature will fail to deliver the basic conditions for it to exist at all.

Food systems are unique in that they are both eminently local and necessarily global in reach and impact. We use them here as an example of how to design systems, standards, and practices that act across all dimensions of the polycrisis and serve the goal of transcending crisis long-term. Cities deliberately play the role of impact investor, to shape healthy, sustainable food environments.

Localizing Finance

Civic Renewal

We cannot transcend this time of polycrisis and secure a livable future for humanity and for Earth’s living systems, unless we pursue and achieve real and empowering civic renewal. Civic renewal must include several elements of practice and effect:

• Places where people of conscience can gather and work together on common problems, without fear of partisan interference or political coercion;

• Engagement strategies that allow for sharing of diverse ideas but filter out vitriol and animus, so people can hear each other;

• Tools that allow vulnerable communities and other stakeholders to shape imaginative, responsible decisions in high-level spaces, for the benefit of all;

• Systems that value non-financial and non-ideological data and subjective inputs, which can inform decision-makers across the mainstream.

Mindful Civics

International Cooperation

Now, more than ever, all nations need to find ways to activate and benefit from the provisions of paragraph 8 of Article 6of the Paris Agreement. Article 6.8 calls for “integrated, holistic and balanced non-market approaches” that allow countries to cooperate to accelerate overall progress on climate-resilient development.

In other words: A race to formulate constructive, cooperative, value-building partnerships, of two, ten, and 120 nations, on different dimensions of the polycrisis and different Sustainable Development Goals, will allow all of the nations involved to reduce risk, improve human security and wellbeing, and lay the foundations for a better future in their context.

Examples of Leadership

A Reflection on the Future

Climate disruption is ongoing and getting worse, fast. Costs are piling up, and most institutions and communities are falling behind in terms of needed new infrastructure and business models to sustain local goods and services. This is affecting prices, readiness, resilience, and the innovation and adaptive capacity needed to navigate this time of polycrisis. Such costly inertia damages public trust and creates further political complications that slow or block urgently needed reforms.

Recognizing this aspect of the political trust dynamic is essential to finding the solutions that work in local context, to allow communities to thrive despite proliferating risks and costly destabilizing impacts. We need to get beyond the idea of “solutions” and shift to a mindset that favors adaptive systems design. That would mean local economies benefit from new financing attuned to local risk reduction and resilience needs. Such local economies also benefit from a wider range of activities being locally relevant, investable, and sustainable over time.

Designing to transcend crisis is not only about creative engineering and science insights; it is about ensuring people and communities have adaptive capacity and livelihoods that do not depend on destructive practices. We can achieve the best possible future for humankind, but only if we make sure we are structuring large-scale systems, along with their intended and actual local impacts, and the core imperatives of the everyday economy, to push drivers of crisis to the margins and center the rights, dignity, imagination, and cooperative capacity of human beings.

Decent work and dignified inclusive processes are the foundational design elements for a livable future. Give more people greater agency, in real terms, with everyday benefits to health and wellbeing, and we can achieve a world free from deprivation, conflict, and chaos.

Join the COP30 Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops

We invite you to join the COP30 cycle of Earth Diplomacy Leadership workshops, which will run from Monday, November 3 through Monday, November 17:

• Session 1 - The Process - Monday, November 3, 2025

• Session 2 - The Stakes - Thursday, November 6, 2025

• Session 3 - Food Systems & Nature - Monday, November 10, 2025

• Session 4 - Banking, Finance & Data - Thursday, November 13, 2025

• Session 5 - COP30 Week 2 Priorities - Monday, November 17, 2025

Register here

RELATED

For the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report, we are focusing on the principle Design to transcend crisis. The implication is that we need to consider not only how to emerge from shock events for the moment, but work toward making them less likely and transcending the systemic drivers of crisis that made those shock events happen.

We have all heard political leaders talk about the difficulties of dealing with mass migration. Some specifically complain that they would like to see migration ‘managed’ to allow societies to adapt more readily. For all the political arguments that might follow such complaints, these facts remain:

• Mass migration happens when places of origin become unlivable.

• Long-distance migration happens when the first, second, and third potential points of refuge cannot provide safety and opportunity.

• The levels of disruption we are seeing now are minuscule in comparison to what will come if we do not succeed in securing climate-resilient opportunity and prosperity for everyone.

• The 2023 State of the Climate report found that 3 to 6 billion people could be “confined beyond the livable region” of our planet by the year 2100.

Designing to transcend crisis means being conscious of the drivers of shock events—both slow-moving and sudden-onset—and actively working to reduce those threats. It means finding ways not to update or upgrade, but to evolve vital civic structures, so that whole societies can be freer, more imaginative and innovative, more humane, and more sustainably prosperous. It means letting more people play an active role in building the everyday core value of economic health and wellbeing.

The most material and immediate way we are working on this principle is in our work to bring new thinking to the design of—and investment in—food systems.

• It is widely thought to be the shift from hunting and gathering to in-place agriculture that gave rise to permanent settlements, cities, and human civilization.

• Cities cannot be sustained without agriculture, and so food production and distribution systems arise in and around cities.

• When the underpinnings of sustainable food production are eroded, entire civilizations can collapse.

• There is evidence that, throughout history, the loss of core ecological benefits led to the collapse of food production and the dispersal of urban populations, and so the loss of that particular civilization.

In our times, we face an unprecedented threat to sustainable food systems:

• Extractive processes, operating at industrial scale, are destabilizing the climate system and eroding watersheds and natural landscapes.

• This has the effect of not only making agriculture more difficult, but making it possible that Nature will fail to deliver the basic conditions for it to exist at all.

The 2024 Reinventing Prosperity report, Beyond the Horizon, related priorities for a livable future from stakeholders in 23 countries. Respondents to the Consultation on Priorities for a Livable Future—who contributed local perspectives and aspirations from 23 countries, across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania—shared a general sense that:

• We find ourselves at a crucial moment of risk and fragility. Small decisions (including delays) could have great consequence—not just for our own access to future wellbeing, but for generations far into the future, and for the composition and health of life on Earth. This awareness of fragility is both a warning and an opportunity.

• All institutions need to upgrade their standards for the future, so that they do well by doing good, especially where there is opportunity to reduce the triple planetary crisis and prevent vulnerability, poverty, hunger, and disease.

The following insights provide a strong outline of the overall call for action from stakeholders around the world:

• Climate change impacts are piling up. A prominent insight among contributors was that climate change impacts are happening now, with costs and risks accumulating, and that some further destabilization of the climate system is “baked in”, because some effects of global heating take time to materialize.

• Cooperative problem-solving is essential. Respondents noted that we are already in a deficit situation, with regard to climate stabilization and climate-resilient development. A consistent insight was the need for nations to work together to innovate, to improve enabling environments, to support investment flowing to better practices that foster environmental sustainability, inclusive integral human development, social and economic justice, and shared prosperity that consistently respects human rights.

• Human dignity is linked to sustainable investment. SDG8 focusing on Decent Work was the least highlighted SDG; this seems to be linked to respondents seeing better practices and better living conditions, with reduced poverty, reduced inequalities, improved health, and better education, as naturally leading to work that is more enjoyable, better paid, and more dignified. To reach that point, where decent work is more widely available, investment in sustainable practices is urgently needed.

• Unsustainable investment is waste. There is widespread agreement that investing in activities that cause harm is wasteful. By reconfiguring value considerations to account for preventable harm and reward sustainable practices, the overall pool of wealth flowing into human enterprise, community-building, and wellbeing can grow, creating an economy that is more abundant, with more good for all.

• New kinds of destabilization are on the horizon. Even if we achieve the best-case scenario for climate action and sustainable development, we know conditions will worsen in some regions—possibly without hope of near-term recovery. Sustainable investment strategies must recognize that this is part of our shared future, and support resilience-building and crisis-response needs, in ways that might seem starkly new as needs evolve.

• Good governance is imperative. Respondents recognize the need for local, national, and cooperative international governance that acts to reduce harm, eliminate risk, and spread wellbeing. Allowing or not allowing unaccountable harm to innocents is widely understood to be a measure of the quality of governance and the legitimacy of institutions. Transparency and zero tolerance for corruption are seen as essential to successfully addressing major challenges at all levels.

What all of this means for the work of Designing to Transcend Crisis is that:

• We need systems attuned to human vulnerability and aspiration, which support economy-wide progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals.

• More people need to have more authority to make informed choices about the smartest ways to achieve sustainable safety and prosperity.

• Technology needs to support improved conditions, and agency, for human beings.

• So, we must resist the temptation to prioritize technological advancement over human rights, liberty, and opportunity, as a shortcut to progress.

• The rights to climate protection and a clean, healthy environment, are inherent in other human rights.

• This means the legitimacy of governments, as such, rests on their ability to deliver, among other things, climate safety and environmental protection.

So, we close this preview of the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report with the following core insights, which we hope will be central to both high-level and local decision-making in the weeks, months, and years ahead:

We can achieve the best possible future for humankind, but only if we make sure we are structuring large-scale systems, along with their intended and actual local impacts, and the core imperatives of the everyday economy, to push drivers of crisis to the margins and center the rights, dignity, imagination, and cooperative capacity of human beings. Give more people greater agency, in real terms, with everyday benefits to health and wellbeing, and we can achieve a world free from deprivation, conflict, and chaos.

Alaska is more than wilderness and empire, more than history and geology. It is also a vantage point for observing the planetary change happening right now through the atmosphere, the ocean, and the shifting of ices and weathers above and below ground. It is a haven and a place of immense vulnerability, a land of freedom and risk and community and isolation. Its islands extend far into the Pacific Ocean, until they nearly touch Russia, with its closest land visible in front of the horizon.

On Friday, Alaska hosted a strange, consequential, enigmatic summit of two heads of government, one from each of the vast countries whose political cultures have, over the last century, sought to shape the rights of all. Vladimir Putin—a war criminal who breached every foundational principle of international law, and faces arrest in much of the world, who has murdered tens of thousands of people to crush democracy and extinguish human rights—was welcomed to a military base in a land his country once sold to the United States, the first country founded on the principle that rights have primacy over power.

We do not yet know what the consequences will be, in far-reaching historical terms, but we can observe a few tell-tale moments of strangeness and intrigue:

• The dictator was caught looking befuddled and unnerved by journalists demanding answers from him, asking moral and legal questions he has no safe way to answer.

• It is instructive to see how involuntarily he reveals this particular weakness, reinforced over decades of unaccountable rule, in which anyone who criticizes him can be jailed, exiled, or disappeared.

• He also showed a plainly foolish side, talking of an ”agreement” he claimed had been reached, only for Mr. Trump to correct him saying there is no deal until there is a deal.

• Though Trump lavished Putin with praise, he also made a point to recognize in clear language that there can be no agreement about Ukraine without Ukraine's full and free consent.

The Alaska summit could be the moment Putin lost Trump—through bullying, intransigence, bloodlust, and arrogance—and with him the hope of manipulating democratic elected officials into some kind of appeasement.

• For the U.S. and allied democracies, there is no way to show strength while capitulating to the demands of a delusional dictator, who constantly threatens nuclear strikes and offers nothing but the unbelievable promise to behave better.

• A just and enduring peace must prevent any further crimes against the people of Ukraine and avoid rewarding Putin for war crimes. (The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine has recorded more than 150,000 violations of the Geneva Conventions by Russian forces, since 2022.)

• The Russian people also suffer from their government's cruel indifference to the immense loss of life and liberty required to help Putin demonstrate strength he lacks—an indifference reportedly observed by American diplomats in the Anchorage meeting.

Today, top U.S. officials will meet with Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy and with European heads of government and senior diplomats, to explore what conditions might bring enduring and just peace, to secure the freedom and sovereignty of Ukraine and reaffirm that war crimes cannot stand.

Alaska itself offers important lessons for all of us hoping to uphold the foundational principles of self-government. At this haunted juncture, we might be well served by some insights from the far north:

• Center values that make community work;

• be steady when risk and fragility threaten to redefine us;

• defend the innocent, always;

• build for all weather.

The summer of 2025 is a time of turmoil and tension. While just 22% of the U.S. population voted to give Donald Trump a second chance at the office of President, his administration is rapidly moving to remake American governance and reshape American communities, with few clear legal foundations for its actions. Even the Supreme Court, in removing blocks on potentially unlawful actions of government, admits that those actions might be unlawful and causing serious injustice to millions of people.

One of the great injustices of industrial-scale pollution is the fact that everyday individual actions contribute to the overall crisis, but individuals are helpless to stop pollution at scale. Pollution is built structurally into the ways in which we solve everyday problems. This is true for climate pollution and also for plastic pollution and other toxic pollutants that contaminate air and water supplies. It is estimated that plastic pollution in the ocean may exceed biomass, by weight, by 2050. As biomass collapses, all other forms of ecological and climate breakdown become more likely.

In the dynamics of that injustice, we may find the answer to this existential challenge. All people have a right to know whether they are making everyday choices that make this planetary crisis—which affects all life on Earth—worse, or whether they are helping to improve our chances of surviving in a dignified and liberated way.

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ICJ finds all nations have a legal duty to act on climate

The International Court of Justice has issued an Advisory Opinion [PDF] finding that nations are obligated to act to reduce climate-related risk for their people and for other nations. This obligation is rooted in specific treaties and other international agreements, but also in customary international law (which recognizes the legitimacy of nation states, as such) and in fundamental human rights, which are transcendent and irreducible.

Paragraph 427 of the ICJ opinion included this historic legal finding:

Failure of a State to take appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG emissions — including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies — may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that State.

What this means, in practical terms, is that courts of law are correct in their interpretation of legal responsibilities and remedies if they find that a national government has acted insufficiently, or contrary to its legal obligations to safeguard the rights of its citizens and of people elsewhere, and that legal remedies can ensue. Remedies might include penalties stated in national laws, in the country in question or in another country, or coordinated actions by groups of countries, working multilaterally to incentivize climate cooperation.

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Canceling climate policy will cost trillions of dollars & worse

The government of the United States has a fundamental responsibility to exercise public authority to protect the American people, and people in other nations, from preventable harm caused by climate pollution. This duty is embodied in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, which commits the government to:

establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

It is also embodied in the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments, which provide for:

• An irreducible right to legal redress;

• The protection of all human rights, including those not written in law;

• Equal protection for all people, without favor for powerful interests that might seek special permission to cause harm to others.

While Congress is working to safeguard the National Weather Service and background Earth observation science that makes it possible, in the wake of the catastrophic loss of 137 lives in central Texas flash floods, the Trump administration has announced it will end sharing of life-saving hurricane data from military satellites, close the Chemical Safety Board, and move to cancel the Environmental Protection Agency’s Endangerment Finding.

Climate change is not theoretical; it is not an idea or a belief. It is happening right now, in every country and region, and it is already imposing massive damage, loss of life, and cost. The strain on public budgets is already enormous and rapidly worsening. Refusing to recognize climate disruption, ignoring or suppressing climate data, sabotaging attribution science, and removing legal protections for human and environemntal safety, cannot and do not exonerate any actor from climate risk and liability.

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Food systems for human, economic & planetary health

Four years after the historic United Nations Food Systems Summit, there are many big questions looming about the future of food systems, globally, at regional and national levels, and in terms of what is available to people, locally, in their everyday lives. A few contextual insights are necessary to frame those big questions:

• Industrial-scale processes, including finance, transportation, and logistics, have a greater influence on how human beings get food today than ever before.

• A wicked polycrisis of climate disruption, shock supply chain disruptions linked to COVID and conflict, resurgent protectionism, and worsening income inequality, have pushed hunger to all-time highs.

• Much of the transformative potential in our food systems is in the hands of smaller-scale actors, even subsistence communities, who are generally ignored by mainstream food policy and finance.

• Earth system data—available not only to large institutions but also smallholders and communities—are essential for supporting the transition to climate-resilient, regenerative food production.

• Planetary health is more of a concern than ever before, as we now see high-impact climate anomalies nearly all the time, including floods, droughts, storms, and rising sea levels.

We describe the polycrisis as a wicked problem, because each of its drivers makes it harder to reduce the risk and cost associated with the others. There are at least five major threads to the ongoing polycrisis, each of which continues to constitute major disruption, even if time-sensitive causes, like the COVID-19 pandemic, would appear to have subsided. Crosscutting concerns mean at least seven dimensions of interacting crisis are making solutions more elusive.

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ADDITIONAL READING

• Food security, lives & overall prosperity are at risk, as climate disruption worsens – The Navigator

• Food finance implications of the ICJ climate opinion – Climate Value Exchange

• What it means to ‘make America great’ – The Faithful Citizen

• What is going on with artificial intelligence? – Activv.net

• ACCESS: Aspirational Collaboration on Climate, Energy, Sustenance, and Security-shorthand for the kind of global agreement and action agenda the Paris conference was tasked with creating;

• GOOD: Generative Organic Optimization Demand-the everyday demand for economics that generate new additional value, while eliminating preventable and unpaid harm; in other words: good economics.

GOOD-based economics focuses on activities that generate new additional value from the combined force of value-adding interacting improvements, which enhance and compound each other’s effects. This requires not only clear strategic non-financial goals and innovative business models, as well as policies and incentives; it also requires reinforcements of the new additional value, to consolidate external returns on investment (XROI), or what are known as compounding co-benefits.

The Demand Challenge

The word ‘demand’, behind the D in GOOD, has been somewhat controversial. Some have argued that demand-based economics will be full of inefficiencies, with money chasing trends and the illusory hard-to-sustain consumer demand set up by marketing campaigns. Others raise the alarm that demand is generating planetary crisis, as consumption spirals to ever-greater overuse of finite resources, to the detriment of health, wellbeing, and Nature. Two important responses to those arguments have stood up over time:

1. Supply-side economics prioritizes apparent efficiencies in wealth creation by chasing trends and the illusory demand set up by marketing campaigns, without regard to real-world value creation; the result has been a destructive accumulation of absurd levels of wealth at the very top of the income ladder, while most people and ecosystems carry added costs and face decreased immediate or long-term security.

2. It isn’t about consumer demand alone; it is about responding to the background natural need for optimized value creation that generates not only a financial return but a stronger foundation for future value creation, in people’s lives, at the human scale, and with constructive benefits to planetary systems that sustain life and make all other value possible.

The goal is to center the integral and holistic needs of all people, communities, industries, and nations, for everyday modes of exchange and value creation that support improved human security and experience, and the sustainable health and resilience of planetary systems.

Generating Real-world value

It is important to highlight, at this moment in the rapid evolution of technology and business, that the word “generative” in GOOD-based economics has nothing to do with so-called “generative artificial intelligence”. Here, generative means: working in a way that produces value-building direct, secondary, and multidimensional effects. Such beneficial effects are reinforcements, in that they consolidate and support building on the GOOD-responsive basis for improved wellbeing.

Looking at human-scale economic activity through the GOOD economics lens, specific kinds of generative reinforcements can be observed, measured, and tracked for their clear value added. This makes it possible to see where economic systems are weak and lack resilience or where they have resilience and are prepared to work through adversity. Because reinforcement of generative dynamics is in everyone’s interest, there is an untapped market opportunity for supporting reinforcements.

Biospheric: Life-sustaining compounds without which human life is not possible: clean air, clean water, and food-borne nutrients. We have replaced the word ‘biological’ with ‘biospheric’ to name this category, to highlight the importance of not only sustaining life in microcosm, but the broader natural conditions that shape the living space of planet Earth.

• Biospheric GOOD reinforcements can be measured in terms of the health and resilience, consistency, and adaptive capacity, of natural systems.

• One example is the farm-adjacent ecosystems that pollinators depend on that allow them to thrive and work in such numbers to support agriculture at levels sufficient to achieve affordable, healthy food for all.

• Another is the chemical composition of the atmosphere, which determines how much heat moves through the climate system, and what conditions are then possible.

Structural: Next are those structural comforts of the built environment, without which human beings are less able to achieve long life expectancy and educational and professional excellence.

• Some examples would be shelter, plumbing and heat, and electricity-all of which must be not only available, but also affordable and aligned with both human and planetary health and wellbeing.

• Others would be the transportation and logistics infrastructure that allows value chains to come together, respond to evolving needs, and become more efficient at delivering value.

• Whether such infrastructure is sustainable, both in its operational capacity and in its impact on Nature, is another element of the overall GOOD calculus.

• These structural GOOD reinforcements are necessary not because one ideology wins out over another, but because an overall assessment of value shows there is more value available when such aspirations are experienced as everyday reality.

Intellectual: To build on biospheric and structural reinfrocements, governments and institutions, can prioritize intellectual commodities that enrich and improve the human experience and decision-making capabilities. These include information, education, technology sufficient for erasing the digital divide, and in our time, effective means of preventing weaponized automated disinformation.

• Social media algorithms and rapidly advancing copy-paste AI systems (“gen AI”) are creating complicated, pervasive, and unprecedented threats to the intellectual and informational reinforcements that make liberated human existence possible.

• More user-centric information services might deprioritize some of the new business models pushed by tech giants, but could allow for a more efficient and empowering upgrade to traditional information systems.

• The freedom to not only identify and critique systems that invite or propagate disinformation, but to spread corrective information and reliably out-compete bad actors, is an important measure of intellectual GOOD reinforcements and their foundational value for everyday economic health and wellbeing.

Political: The hope, then, would be that with these biospheric, structural, and intellectual reinforcements come political liberties.

• There is expanded overall opportunity in a society that recognizes and upholds freedom of thought, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom from all forms of discrimination, and an enforceable guarantee of voting rights and the right to pursue legal redress for grievances.

• In short: to put the preceding GOOD reinforcements into practice in the world, ordinary people need leverage to hold power accountable and to ensure justice is always possible if not always immediate.

• The ability of individuals, communities, and institutions, to act with moral, practical, and political sovereignty is enhanced by value-generating biospheric, structural, and intellectual GOOD reinforcements.

Community: Individuals and families tend to be, as economic actors, expressions of Generative Organic Optimization Demand, specifically over and above the four preceding categories of primordial GOOD economic requirements: biospheric, structural, intellectual, and political.

• Individuals and families are best able to participate in the economic, social and political constellation of influences, when there is community infrastructure allowing for substantive, character-driven interaction at the human scale.

• This is because they are witnesses-conscious and conscientious actors that bring to their environment their own insights, ethics, cooperative impulses, and the trust-building urge to create better outcomes.

• In communities that are healthy, where people are free to make their own choices and also enjoy the protection of fundamental, univeral rights, it is possible for self-interest and shared interest to come together in ways that make it easier to do well by doing good.

These last two-political and community-level GOOD reinforcements-specifically prioritize the rights of individuals over the power of large networks, because unless GOOD co-benefits are reinforced at the human scale, the health-building effect at societal scale cannot be achieved. To achieve best-case sustainable prosperity and security, all nations need to have functioning civic spaces where real-world need and optimal approaches can have a hearing, hold sway, and overcome a flawed status quo.

Cooperative Problem-solving for development & security

From the vantage point of mid-2025, it is worth looking back 9 and a half years to the question of ACCESS to a livable future, through a global cooperative endeavor consciously focused on leveraging GOOD reinforcements. At the time of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, both of which also built on a global commitmen to improved Financing for Development and cooperative Disaster Risk Reduction, we identified the need to link climate and food systems to economic prosperity and sustainable security.

This led to the ACCESS standard:

• Aspirational-aiming for the best possible outcome: reducing climate risk, building resilience, achieving sustainable inclusive human development, on time, for everyone (the SDGs are a good measure of how high our aspirations need to be);

• Collaboration-working together at all levels to make this possible, establishing and sustaining intelligent, value-building cooperative approaches between communities, cities, regions, and nations, and across sectors and value chains;

• Climate-recognizing that without serious progress toward comprehensive decarbonization and climate-resilient development, all other human aspirations will be more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, focusing on the 1.5ºC maximum global heating threshold and evidence from the AR6 that we must achieve this by 2040 or lose critical stabilizing structures of the climate system;

• Energy-building decarbonized energy economies, including through technology sharing, financial innovation, just transition strategies, cooperative system-level innovation, aligned incentives, and climate-smart trade;

• Sustenance-starting with food systems, and extending to the wider landscape of human need, including cultural creation, creative collaboration, and education, that fits the tension of our times (again, the SDGs are a solid reference);

• Security-no longer pretending that climate is a niche issue that does not affect the stability of nation states, developing plans to address the rapidly proliferating threats putting dozens of countries into debt distress and risk of geophysical, socio-economic, and fiscal destabilization.

The Paris Agreement is, we believe, structured to support this broad cooperative agenda for shared sustainable prosperity and security. That structure invites new major steps forward that have not yet been agreed, including specific approaches to cooperative decarbonization, like a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Cooperative problem-solving can also work far more broadly, across all areas of human development and economic interest. Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement calls for “integrated, holistic, and balanced non-market approaches “ to multilateral cooperation to accelerate overall climate crisis response. The Climate Value Exchange is focused on building awareness of and action toward this cooperative effort toward the best-case future for all.

Maximizing Enduring Value-Creation

The Resilience Intel intiative grew out of this ACCESS to GOOD draft framework. At its core, Resilience Intel was centered on the principle that to generate enduring value, finance and investment, whether from the public, private, multilateral, or philanthropic sectors, should support enhanced macrocritical resilience. That just means effects that are healthy and resilient at the macro level-across the wider scope of human activity and our dependence on Nature.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals -each with around 10 target areas for improved outcomes-are are a good reference for drivers of macrocritical resilience. An example would be the prosperity and security value of equal rights and full educational access for women and girls: Societies that do well on this measure are more secure; those that treat women most cruelly are among the most violent and unstable.

Another example is food systems. The Food System Economics Commission has found that since the Paris Agreement was signed in April 2016, the world has collectively spent or lost more than $140.4 trillion due to unsustainable food systems that undermine watersheds, ecosystem integrity, climate security, and human health and wellbeing.

At the COP29 U.N. Climate Change negotiations in Baku, Azerbaijan, last year, the 196 nations formally committed to preventing dangerous industrial climate disruption, under the global Climate Convention, adopted finance mobilization goals of $300 billion per year from wealthy industrialized countries and $1.3 trillion per year “from all sources”. To get there, important innovations will need to emerge and be adopted widely in the everyday operation of financial institutions both in government and in private enterprise.

To effectively leverage the full spectrum of value-building priorities linked to the ACCESS to GOOD standard, and to avoid the kind of resource destruction tracked through food systems (which is, by the way, far more than the $1.3 trillion in projected climate-related finance “from all sources”), GOOD-aligned money needs to get local and create benefits at the human scale. We cite here several reports that highlight opportunities inherent in right-scaling and gettng local to create additional value:

New tools are being designed to mobilize resources for this more cooperative, human-scale approach to global climate security. One example is the Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation being developed by the Good Food Finance Network and key partner institutions.

While June 2025 negotiations in Bonn, Germany, will not decide specifics of how such efforts will play out, they should be informed by and leverage the potential of these critical innovations. The Earth Diplomacy Leadership page for a Post-negotiations Debrief will track the process and link to useful dispatches and other resources.

A REMINDER

Climate impacts are the effect of planetary dynamics, but they strike locally, and infiltrate everyday experience. Wildfire smoke can make cherished places, or everyday surroundings, unbreathable; flash floods can strike after only minutes of industrially intensified rainfall over ground left dry from drought and anomalous heat; degraded watersheds undermine the ecological balance and integrity of natural systems that support pollinators and make agriculture possible.

Climate policy and sustainable economics are not abstractions; they are decisions about whether or not our lives will be safe and free, open to our ingenuity and enjoyment. We can decide whether societies have a real chance to coexist peacefully or whether they will suffer and spread damage and destabilization.

• Food Systems (more at CAFSA.net), and

• Climate Banking (climatevalue.net/banking).

The schedule will run as follows:

• Session 1: Monday, June 2 – The Process (09:00 EDT / 13:00 UTC)

• Session 2: Thursday, June 5 – Climate Action and Food Systems virtual forum (09:00 EDT / 13:00 UTC)

• Session 3: Thursday, June 5 – Climate Banking Innovation dialogue (11:00 EDT / 15:00 UTC)

• Session 4: Monday, June 9 – The Stakes (09:00 EDT / 13:00 UTC)

Please visit the landing page for this series. You will find a detailed overview of each session, as well as relevant background materials, links to formal UNFCCC documents and agendas, and a wider resource library for ongoing follow-up. You can also click there to register, or click the button below.

Register here

THEMATIC OVERVIEW

The Process

In 1992, nearly 200 nations agreed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which commits the Parties to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. In June, in Bonn, 196 nations meet to negotiate next steps, acting as the Subsidiary Bodies to the Convention. The SB62 agendas encompass areas addressed by the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technical Advise and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation. → Session details

Climate Action and Food Systems

The Sharm el-Sheikh Joint Work on the Implementation of Climate Action on Agriculture and Food Security (SJWA) was adopted during the COP27 UN Climate Change negotiations in Egypt, in 2022. The aim was to bridge the work of making food systems climate-resilent with the work of transforming economies to support climate-resilient development. Acting on this emerging agenda could restore nature, spur sustainable development, diversify rural economies, and support climate-smart trade in line with Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement. → Session details

Climate Banking Innovation

Climate impacts are getting worse, happening more frequently, costing more, and compounding each other’s effects. It is becoming ever more urgent for local communities, regional governments, and businesses at the micro, small, and medium scales, to establish climate resilience plans and capabilities. This embedded climate value will need to be measured, supported, sustained, and built on. Climate value banking, or climate banking, will emerge as a layer within existing institutions, a specialized business model among new start-ups, and eventually will become a core feature of mainstream banking services at all levels. → Session details

The Stakes

All nations are committed to deliver the 3rd edition of their Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC 3.0) for implementation of the decarbonization agenda of the Paris Agreement. These should be comprehensive, economy-wide development strategies that foster economic wellbeing in ways that are sustainable and climate-aligned. Failure to move forward nationally and globally will leave worsening, and likely unmanageable costs, to future generations, with many of those costs hitting already in the coming 10-15 years. → Session details

As always, you can follow the Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative, and review past sessions, dispatches, outcomes, and analysis, at EarthDiplo.org

Diplomacy under Pressure: The Belém Opportunity

Political preferences do not make climate change a non-problem. In fact, evidence shows global heating and climate disruption are accelerating, while damages and costs are proliferating. In 2025, stark choices stand before political and business leaders. As climate disruption spreads and complicates, new modes of finance, trade, development, and innovation, need to take root and start building new kinds of value.

Keep reading

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As an Augustinian center of learning, Villanova emphasizes that learning is a necessary part of doing good for others. This is not about power or privilege, but about reasoned clarity and freedom of moral choice. Augustine of Hippo (commonly known as St. Augustine) observed that one cannot make virtuous choices if one does not know they are choosing right over wrong. Knowledge cannot come from indoctrination; knowledge comes from engagement with evidence.

Augustine wrote that “the truth is fragrant”; it calls you to it. Access to evidence is engagement with a trail of breadcrumbs that are elements of divine truth. They lead you to knowledge, and from there, you can rightly determine that a given choice is virtuous. By contrast, refusing to follow those breadcrumbs is a decision to renounce moral choice.

In the Augustinian tradition, evidence, truth, learning, and knowledge, are tied to service. We are bound to each other by a fundamental ethical obligation. Science is an ethical duty, for all of us. We have a duty never to stop asking questions, lest we let assumptions and prejudices do violence to the innocent.

Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost is an example of this teaching. His own learning led him to his vocation of service. He served as a missionary, a local parish priest, and a bishop in Chiclayo, Perú. He is known by those he served among not as a patriarch, but as a servant leader who was always grateful for the opportunity to live and work among them, to walk the moral journey of faith with them.

In his first remarks as Pope Leo XIV, he thanked those he served with in Chiclayo for always accompanying him, and he called on all Catholics to walk together, to be allies of those in need, and to be part of the joyous work of ensuring that “evil will not prevail.”

In his first mass, in the Sistine Chapel, today, he tackled the thorny question of power versus service head on, calling for “a missionary church” that aligns with and uplifts “ordinary people”.

• He warned that in today’s world, many institutions and individuals treat this true Christianity as “absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent”.

• The passion for unabashed hard power seems ascendant, and this poses a moral and practical crisis for peoples in all regions of the world.

• He warned that faith does not seek or prefer “other securities… like technology, money, success, power or pleasure.”

• He framed faith not as rigid enforcement of doctrine, but as moving one to dignified action and service to others, and said the missionary work of an open-hearted community of faith is “desperately needed”.

In all of this, Pope Leo XIV is communicating a core Augustinian principle, and the founding spirit of Villanova University: Each of us is responsible for seeking knowledge, for the purpose of informing our ability to be of service, to reduce the opportunities for evil to spread and to expand the space for grace and justice.

We should celebrate the fact that Pope Leo appears committed to continuing the message of Pope Francis — that all people deserve decency and dignity and that the powerful should make themselves small while uplifting those who do not hold institutional power.

In my view, his personal history and his opening messages tell us he will continue Pope Francis’ message about the need to care for Creation. It is a fundamental moral duty to consider evidence and to prevent irreversible damage to life-giving systems we did not create and cannot replace.

In choosing the name Leo, Cardinal Prevost evoked the example of Pope Leo I, who in the year 452 persuaded Attila the Hun not to slaughter the people of Rome, urging him to “Conquer yourself” and show that he was big enough to show mercy.

In the 1840s, when Villanova University was established, a surge in terrorist violence was targeting immigrants, Catholics, and centers of learning. The ‘Know Nothings’ burned the St. Augustine Church in Philadelphia. Pope Leo is calling for moral courage from all — for the powerful to make themselves small, to be decent and merciful, for the intolerant to conquer themselves and open their hearts, and for those without power to stand against evil, work to prevent atrocities, and bring grace into the world.

When Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio took the name Francis, some observed that the name—and wider legacy of St. Francis—clashed with the opulence and historic power of the Vatican. Pope Francis put those trappings of wealth and power aside, dressed more simply, and even chose to live in humble rooms, instead of the traditional papal palace. Others observed that by choosing the name Francis, the new pope was signaling a personal confidence in the purpose and power of Christian teaching—that to serve others was the best and most resonant possible expression of the Church.

From the beginning, Pope Francis sought to foster an ecumenical conversation—including all faiths, including people of no faith—about the life of the spirit, about reciprocal generosity as a core human value. He sought to heal schisms hundreds or even thousands of years old, and he promoted the idea that what makes his own faith universal is not Catholic doctrine, but the simple impulse to be decent to others.

In 2015, Pope Francis issued an Encyclical Letter—the highest cateogry of papal teaching, an open letter to the faithful and to the wider community of humanity. The Encyclical was titled Laudato Si’, On Caring for Our Common Home. At its core, it recognized the divine grace inherent in all that Nature provides, and outlined a core moral duty to care for Creation.

Laudato Si'

In a section titled ‘Nothing in this world is indifferent to us’, Pope Francis cites several of his predecessors, grounding his vision for an ethics of integral ecology in a background of Church teaching:

• Blessed Pope Paul VI warned that “Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation”.

• Saint John Paul II warned in his first Encyclical he warned that human beings frequently seem “to see no other meaning in their natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption” and called for human development that accounts for “the nature of each being and of its mutual connection in an ordered system”.

• He cited his predecessor Benedict XVI who called for “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment”.

Pope Francis explained why St. Francis was such an inspiration to him, writing in the Encyclical that touched so many Franciscan values:

I believe that Saint Francis is the example par excellence of care for the vulnerable and of an integral ecology lived out joyfully and authentically. He is the patron saint of all who study and work in the area of ecology, and he is also much loved by non-Christians. He was particularly concerned for God’s creation and for the poor and outcast. He loved, and was deeply loved for his joy, his generous self-giving, his openheartedness.

He called for “the whole human family” to join “a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet” and to “cooperate as instruments of God for the care of creation, each according to his or her own culture, experience, involvements and talents”. He noted that science and evidence help us to understand both the complexity and the ethical urgency inherent in the disruption of Earth’s climate system. He traced the connection between the physical climate system and our ethical interconnection, writing:

The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life.

Laudato Si’ detailed risk to human health and wellbeing, and to planetary health, from disruption of water supplies, loss of biodiversity, rising global inequality, and the decline in human quality of life and societal breakdown, resulting from this web of interacting forces.

Read more

Pope Francis laid out the Gospel of Creation, including the mystery underlying all of Nature—a call for faith-driven respect for that which we have not, ourselves, created. He says that:

each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.

The Encyclical called for an integral ecology, an authentic human cooperative pursuit of knowledge, justice, and sustainable shared prosperity, in harmony with Nature. It came only months before the community of nations would adopt the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. 2015 also saw global agreements on Disaster Risk Reduction and Financing for Development.

As more than 190 governments worked together to create conditions for enduring prosperity and peace, the message of care for Creation and for each other, resonated across faith traditions, throughout civil society, and in the halls of power. It was becoming possible to reasonably conceive of a future in which the quest of a few for unlimited power would no longer darken the lives of billions.

That work is unfinished. Maybe it will always be unfinished, but the tone has been set, and a new way of thinking about high office and global leadership has come into existence. Billions of people want the future to be a time of real and reciprocal improvements, of servant leaders and vibrant societies of people freely cooperating to bring better outcomes into being.

The legacy of Pope Francis will be one of humble but no-nonsense servant leadership—a defiant optimism untainted by the quest for institutional or material power. He set an example of moral liberation, where achievement is the uplifting of the vulnerable, the rescuing of the persecuted, the forthright and honorable stewardship of all that Nature offers and which we cannot create ourselves.

As with any great leader, the legacy of Pope Francis will be defined by the way others live the example he set. Regardless of the politics of the moment, transcendent legitimacy in fact requires humble servant leadership and commitment to an integral ecology—a respect for others and for the fabric of life. That future is ours to make, and that is a joyous possibility.

The following is a CNN report on the papacy and legacy of Pope Francis:

In the midst of a major boom in tech stocks, with talk of AI taking over civil service responsibilities, those companies most connected to AI-enabling data systems suffered all-time record losses in a single day of trading that erased more than $1 trillion in market capitalization. What may be getting lost in the mix is that measurable Climate Value is being lost or forsaken, in exchange for short-term bets that look shaky at best.

CCI is working to advance health-building sustainable food systems.

At Climate Civics International, March was a time for expanding our network’s efforts to advance health-building, sustainable food systems. Food systems tie human industry and investment to planetary health and to human wellbeing, everywhere. Since global food crisis continues to become more likely, we have moved on a number of fronts to give stakeholders and policy-makers more actionable insights, to reorient mainstream activities and build a more secure future.

We launched the City Food Finance Principles to Build Climate Value:

1. Common Reality – Health-building, nutritious, sustainably produced food should be an affordable, accessible everyday option for all.

2. Delivering Impact – Cities deliberately play the role of impact investor, to shape healthy, sustainable food environments.

3. Urban-Rural Feedbacks – Cities work with surrounding rural areas to support convergence of consumption, production, and incentives.

4. Multilevel Cooperation – Cities engage with regional and national authorities to support enhanced implementation of national climate, food, health, and biodiversity plans.

5. Co-Investment – Cities engage proactively to shape and mobilize investment partnerships linked to a broader Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation.

6. Tracking and Labeling – Cities act as critical intermediaries to support needed data systems integration and multidimensional metrics.

We also hosted a workshop focused on levers for Advancing Climate-Smart Trade & Finance. As we noted in our report from the session:

A headline takeaway from the discussion is that multidimensional climate cooperation can improve lives and livelihoods, while reducing climate risk and building climate value. Such cooperative arrangements are not only strong candidates for improved deployment of climate-related finance; they are means of mainstreaming and, by extension, rapidly scaling climate-smart financial innovation.

Our recent Capital to Communities update focused on localizing financial innovation—emphasizing the fact that:

Leverage points for building overall optimized and enduring value exist throughout the web of summit to seabed connections. Each of those leverage points becomes investable with locally rooted, relevant, and actionable insights, and investment to drive measurable improvements.

A key insight from the Data Systems Integration Forum we hosted for the Good Food Finance Network was that—in financial innovation, in data-sharing, in business model innovation, and in work toward affordable nutrition, we must consider the human. That means the fate and interest of the human being in the wider system and also the value of each person having more agency, better livelihoods and greater means, and more freedom and safety.

We joined an open letter from 153 winners of Nobel Prizes and the World Food Prize, calling for a Nutrition Security Moonshot. In our statement of support, we noted:

The promise inherent in applied Earth systems science data making new livelihoods, and better compensation, available to vulnerable agricultural communities goes beyond climate resilience. Such data systems can bring major new investment and diversified job creation to remote communities, and make it easier to give consumers the information they need to support the best practices and products.

There is opportunity in complexity.

All of these are context for our examination of diplomacy under pressure and the opportunities inherent in the climate negotiations that will take place in Belém, in Brazil, in November. The discussion focused on the need for quality of resourcing and actions in key areas, including finance, process, science and open access to reliable information, and effective adaptation and resilience measures.

Follow-up Earth Diplomacy Leadership sessions will build on this core insight:

In 2025, stark choices stand before political and business leaders. As climate disruption spreads and complicates, new modes of finance, trade, development, and innovation, need to take root and start building new kinds of value. When leaders dither and delay on effective climate crisis response, food insecurity, spillover pathogen risk, and the seeds of conflict spread and induce forced displacement and destabilization.

Diplomacy sessions

That system of self-government has been developed carefully and lawfully over more than two centuries, under Congressional and Executive leadership from both major parties. The extremists who rant against government “waste”, when taxpayer money is invested in public services, want the same taxpayer money to go to themselves and their friends and favored industries. Trump said as much in writing in his executive order declaring a (baseless) energy emergency.

Presidents are not kings. The President has no authority not granted specifically by law. He has no authority to make Elon Musk, the head of an informal advisory panel, into a shadow president with authority to unilaterally overrule Congress, the courts, or contract law, much less the Constitution.

In these early days of the Project 2025 terror, we have a limited window of opportunity to understand that attacks on any person's rights are the beginning of the end of all of our rights.

• Detentions without warrant and the unilateral creation of mass detention camps to hold people without charge or due process directly violate the Constitution and threaten to void all of our rights to personal freedom and due process.

• Trump’s attempt to overrule the 14th Amendment with the stroke of his pen is an attempt to strip all of us of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. If Trump can selectively strip Americans of their right to citizenship, he can selectively strip Americans of other rights as well.

• The effort to strip Americans of core rights guaranteed by the Constitution is also evident in Trump’s war on free speech. He has ordered the unilateral defunding of any program, including law enforcement and cancer research grants, that uses words such as ‘justice’, and has asked the Attorney General to consider charges against private companies that talk about justice, accessibility, and the rights of women.

• Note: The Constitution says the republic was created “to establish Justice”, it grants all people equal protection of the law, and it specifically protects women against political discrimination. And yes, sadly, there is an effort to roll back women’s access to the vote.

His illegal removal of inspectors general and prosecutors, either without cause or as retaliation for their law enforcement work, demonstrates overt hostility to the very idea that he works in service of the People and the Constitution.

The new Director of the Office of Management and Budget is a co-author of Project 2025, who stated that his goal is to put dedicated civil servants “in trauma”, to terrorize them out of resisting the violation of their rights. A report on the known plans for an authoritarian takeover urges those loyal to democracy to “Protect the first targets, and arrange now to advocate for the most vulnerable.”

Prosecutors in the famously independent Southern District of New York, including conservatives who worked with Justice Scalia, have resigned in protest rather than follow an unlawful order to drop charges against the Mayor of New York City in what has been acknowledged tacitly to be a quid-pro-quo.

The scathing letters written by resigning federal prosecutors in New York reveal that what they are resisting is an overt attempt to corrupt the entire system of federal law enforcement, to turn it into a kind of political protection racket. Imagine what it means for your rights and liberties, if no part of federal law enforcement is free from corrupt political control.

Trump’s firing without cause of the Archivist of the United States puts at risk the lawful functioning of the entire system of self-government and is, by his own admission, an act of illegal retribution.

• The Archivist instructs, oversees, and ensures the integrity of the Electoral College voting process, supports and manages the process of amending the Constitution, and ensures the secure system of classification to protect national security is not breached.

• The Archivist also ensures accurate records are available and properly released to the press and to citizens under the Freedom of Information Act.

• Trump despises the Archivist and the agency she leads, because of the fallout he experienced from his own decision to unlawfully abscond with and repeatedly conceal from investigators hundreds of classified documents, for reasons that have still not been adjudicated.

• His attempt to corrupt the management of the National Archives puts at risk the integrity of the entire democratic process and could make it impossible for the People to defend their rights and exercise actual self-government.

We need to understand that when laws are broken by the President, all of our rights and liberties are at risk. There are clear examples where direct and intolerable harm to people is front and center:

• The attempted dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau leaves tens of thousands of defrauded consumers without redress and millions more unprotected from criminal fraud and abuse.

• The unlawful seizure of private financial and health data by Elon Musk and his DOGE team, resulting in transferring of that data to commercial AI servers, directly violates federal rights guarantees protecting all Americans.

• The blanket order to freeze federal grants threatens to steal from the states an average of 1/3 of their entire annual budgets, undermining public services from schools to police and fire departments, to roads, infrastructure, health services, and emergency medical response.

• The attempt to rip apart the staffing of the Department of Veterans Affairs is telling: Many are veterans themselves, and their work is to serve others who have sacrificed for the defense of the rest of us.

The attempted dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) puts millions of lives at risk around the world, stealing from starving children, creating immediate risk of new epidemics, and destroying a core expression of the good will and devoted alliance of the American people. Republican senators from Kansas have pushed back, noting the seizure of funds for USAID cut off revenue to farmers.

Defunding of USAID and withdrawal from the World Health Organization not only undermine global standing and negotiating power; both actions directly undermine the global capacity for novel pathogen detection and increase the likelihood of new pandemics. DOGE seizure of health agencies and freezing of funds for research also increase the risk of outbreaks and reduce pandemic preparedness.

There is evidence emerging that DOGE is engaging in illegal acts of political harassment and retaliatory firings. PBS reports one disturbing example:

“The official DOGE Facebook page started harassing me on my personal Facebook account after I criticized Tesla and Twitter,” Spitzer-Stadtlander wrote. “Less than a week later, I was fired, despite my position allegedly being exempted due to national security.”

Top Trump emissaries have fanned out across Europe suggesting he will try to force Ukraine to surrender territory to Putin, while getting nothing for the future of Ukraine or the free world. Trump himself has talked about a deal with Putin to slash U.S. military spending, baffling allies and his own supporters.

In a resounding rebuke to Trump’s apparent desire to dismantle American influence and security alliances, veteran CBS and NBC reporter Marvin Kalb warned:

“A deal leaving Ukraine in a ditch would mean America’s role as a trusted global leader would now be a thing of the past.”

The early days of Trump’s second term have given us dozens of examples of a President operating outside the law. The Constitution distributes power between the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, the States, the Press, and the People. The President owes genuine service and accountability to all of the others. Republican allies of the President need to act now, before checks and balances are eroded beyond repair.

For more news about the rapidly evolving state of American government, check out or sign up for The Navigator.

The Navigator

Covering climate, democracy, science, innovation, and the surprising intersections between geopolitics and local experience.

By Joseph Robertson

The executive order in which Trump purports to void the right to citizenship for some Americans directly contravenes Section 1 of the 14th Amendment and illegally orders federal agencies to strip such people of all rights enjoyed by citizens. This sets a precedent that any right, of any person, can be summarily erased by a president, based solely on his or her whim or preference.

More than 20 states and numerous organizations are now fighting back against this illegal action. One suit, led by the State of New Jersey, calls for an immediate injunction and notes the language of the 14th Amendment is not only decisive; it specifically bars those having jurisdiction, the authority of public office, from questioning or denying the citizenship of a person born in the US.

Remember: In the American system of self-government, rights need not be written into law to exist and enjoy protection (the Ninth Amendment specifically makes this a Constitutional guarantee), but powers must be clearly outlined in laws that abide by the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Powers cannot be invented out of thin air, and presidents cannot overrule the Constitution.

Since Trump claimed this nonexistent authoritarian power to selectively strip Americans of their rights, he has:

• Ordered federal agencies to not only end, but ban any work fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion, or access for people with disabilities, and ordered directors send menacing threats to staff demanding they report on anyone known to be harboring such “ideologies” or face “adverse consequences”;

• Rescinded the Executive Order in which President Johnson, as part of the landmark 1960s breakthroughs on civil rights, ordered an end to discrimination in the federal workplace;

• Ordered the Department of Justice to cease all civil rights cases until further notice, including ongoing cases with deadlines set by judges, pending a possible determination that the Department will be permanently barred from defending the civil rights of Americans;

• Declared a fake “energy emergency”, so he can use emergency powers to force the delivery of funds, lands, and other resources to friends in the oil and gas, mining, construction, and technology sectors;

• Contravened the logic of that “energy emergency” by attempting to end all federal investment in wind energy;

• Ordered the Department of Justice to inform state and local officials that they may face prosecution if they do not participate in Trump’s planned paramilitary roundup of people suspected of not having proper immigration status—a process expected to include raids of churches and schools, which have not been authorized by any judicial warrant;

• Frozen federal government action to lower the cost of prescription drugs and ordered the removal of subsidies that allow states to provide healthcare coverage to more than 20 million additional, highly vulnerable Americans, including children of low-income families—actions that directly violate federal law;

• Ordered a freeze on distribution of all foreign development assistance, including for food and medical aid on which tens of millions of people around the world, and dozens of nations, depend;

• Demanded an apology from an Episcopal bishop who asked him to have mercy on vulnerable Americans, as if mercy were indecent and cruelty were a right.

Trump’s recklessness is putting the country at risk in material ways, and undermining his own ability to negotiate anything the country needs or cares about.

For instance:

• His sanctions on the International Criminal Court will likely create real practical, geopolitical, and personal problems for Trump and for the country, putting at risk the global commitment to the rule of law, which will have far-reaching ripple effects that will damage US interests in countless ways.

• His order to immediately cease all public communication from health agencies and block travel and meetings will halt research, slow discovery of emerging threats and obstruct responses to public health threats large and small.

• His attempt to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization will reduce both national and global pandemic preparedness and subject Americans and people around the world to increased risk of destabilizing health threats.

• His withdrawal from the Paris Agreement reduces the likelihood of timely, effective action to slow climate disruption, which will mean ever-increasing costs across all areas of American life.

• Trump is hollowing out the National Security Council by dismissing 160 non-political career experts. This reduced national security capability comes at a time when the US is facing a complex global matrix of worsening threats.

Law enforcement groups that supported Trump’s candidacy have denounced his pardoning of paramilitary operatives that assaulted and murdered police during the Capitol attack, warning the release of such violent offenders “sends a dangerous message that the consequences for attacking law enforcement are not severe, potentially emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence.”

Every American, whether they voted for Trump or not, even if they still believe he cares about the country’s security and wellbeing, should be alarmed by this series of abuses and by the precedent they set.

• What would stop a future president from using Trump’s example to unilaterally void the right to bear arms, annul the Fourth Amendment, outlaw some forms of speech or seize and reallocate funds without approval from Congress?

• What would stop a future president from declaring a climate emergency and summarily ending oil and gas leases, just because the overall national response has been too slow, and climate costs are breaking the budget?

• If Trump can use federal agents to intimidate law enforcement and arrest people without warrants, what is to stop a future president from enacting warrantless raids of every business suspected of hiding information from the IRS?

Trump voters did not vote for dictatorship; they voted for someone they believed would uphold and defend their rights. If you have such faith in American law and government that you believe unconstitutional abuses will not be upheld or allowed, then reach out to those who represent you and ask them to support legislative and judicial action to block these abuses.

UPDATE

On Thursday, January 23, 2025, a federal judge temporarily blocked President Trump’s executive order purporting to amend or reinterpret Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. Judge John Coughenour, who was appointed to the federal bench by former President Ronald Reagan, described the order as “blatantly unconstitutional” and questioned how any person licensed to practice law in the United States could claim it was lawful.

The suit is one of five filed so far challenging the executive order. The immediate restraining order blocking implementation of the executive order was necessary, according to states and the judge, because the unconstitutional order would lead to implementation actions by federal agencies that would directly harm people targeted by the order and states that have a legal duty to serve them.

Read the judge's order

I write today with a heavy heart and a heart full of hope, with a message for the moment and some important news. I offer some views I hope will be of value to you, and to others you work with and care about.

My heart is heavy, because we find the American democratic republic fraught with an atmosphere of fear and frustration, made worse by disinformation and broken trust, and because this same crisis is spreading around the world.

My heart remains full of hope, however, because fear is a poor competitor. Those who wield it to empower themselves may succeed for a time in holding back their critics, or that decency that holds the life force of every human soul, but they do not persuade.

Fearmongers seek to blind others as they blind themselves, to weaken our collective resolve to work for a better world, together, in good faith, for the benefit of others we will never know. They may succeed in blinding many, or diffusing our sense of urgency about resisting what is morally inexcusable, but they cannot persuade any honest person that our values should be shredded or that our most decent and humanizing aspirations had no legitimate foundation and no worthy way forward.

Today, it seems most important to remember the hopeful command of Dr. King, that we must "adjourn the councils of despair and bring new light into the dark chambers of pessimism".

As I noted in my annual Geoversiv letter:

"To make the future we hope for more likely, we must continue to seek, imagine, learn, connect, and cooperate. Big problems don't get solved by bluster; they get solved by cooperation."

This is why, with planetary crisis deepening, it is so essential that we have robust, ongoing, everyday civics focused on solving big problems. Climate Civics International is setting a tone for 2025, in this spirit:

"In this new year of worrying trends and spreading threats to human security and wellbeing, we invite our friends and allies to put aside despair and disinformation, in favor of responsible civics to shape our world."

This is also why we are now building a new publication called The Navigator, in recognition of the fact that:

"Regardless of your political perspective, regardless of whom you hold responsible, you have an interest in knowing as much as you can about the state of our world, and in understanding how sweeping trends affect what is possible to you locally."

Through The Navigator, a community of writers, journalists, and collaborating publications, will report on the evolving landscape of planetary emergency and the quest to sustain human freedom and wellbeing. We aim to deliver the kind and quality of information that can help individuals and the wider society steer through this time of converging crises.

Please explore and share it with those you feel would be interested to follow this path of discovery with us.

The Navigator

Covering climate, democracy, science, innovation, and the surprising intersections between geopolitics and local experience.

By Joseph Robertson

In 2024, we made a decision to rename and reorient CCI as Climate Civics International. Our aim, as we pursue a broader range of climate-related issues and modes of empowerment, is to highlight the importance of civics as one of the solutions to the worsening global climate challenge.

We believe everyone’s chances of success, including governments and industry, are enhanced when the design of our world is shaped by the needs and aspirations of all people. To honor this reality, we are orienting our citizen empowerment and high-level policy work toward four core program goals:

• Goal 1: Build and empower networks of climate civics advocates

• Goal 2: Enhance climate diplomacy and international cooperation

• Goal 3: Advance sustainable, just and inclusive, food systems

• Goal 4: Accelerate decarbonization and resilience-building

Advocacy Networks

In 2024, our team supported volunteer policy advocates in 76 countries across 6 continents. They helped to train and activate new groups of volunteers in places like Rio de Jaineiro, Brazil; Cairo, Egypt; Monrovia, Liberia; Budapest, Hungary; Adamawa State, Nigeria; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Kathmandu, Nepal; and others.

In 2025, our work to empower networks of climate civics advocates will continue, with new information, strategic initiatives, and organizing opportunities. 2024 saw important new examples of citizen organizing and direct advice to policy-makers. This year, we will build on that success by helping volunteers replicate state-level successes seen in Nigeria and elsewhere, and learn from the efforts of volunteers in Europe who advise a high-level commission of the European Union.

Climate Diplomacy

Our work on enhancing climate diplomacy saw many breakthroughs in 2024, including the launch of the Climate Value Exchange—a partnerships platform aimed at supporting implementation of Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement.

• Article 6.8 invites bilateral and multilateral cooperation across a wide range of issues and challenges related to climate change and which can foster sustainable development and peaceful shared prosperity.

• We held the first Interparliamentary Exchange, in Washington, DC, in June.

• In 2025, we will organize a larger Climate Value Exchange Conference, to bring together leaders, stakeholders, institutions, and experts, to think through and explore new modes of multidimensional climate cooperation.

The Earth Diplomacy Leadership Initiative will also enter a new phase, with expanded opportunities for year-round engagement and tailored trainings. The People’s Pavilion digital platform—which in November facilitated global remote engagement with the annual climate negotiations, with support from VoLo Foundation—will play a key role in this work.

Food Systems

In 2024, we expanded our work on food systems transformation by joining the Good Food Finance Network and becoming a coordinating core partner organization. We finalized and published the Good Food Finance Blueprint on Data Systems Integration, in May, and will continue to carry that work forward, with the aim of making climate value in food systems an observable reality for stakeholders, food producers, policy-makers, and investors.

In 2025, CCI will support implementation of a six-country Green Climate Fund Readiness grant, administered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. This work is linked to the effort to create a new global co-investment platform for food systems transformation. Such a platform could unlock important new investment in the expanded (and climate-safe) development of rural and front-line communities.

Decarbonization & Resilience

Our goal of accelerating decarbonization and resilience covers a diverse range of policies and sustainable development objectives.

• We will continue the work we have long done to build political will for solid, predictable, fair, and effective pollution pricing that delivers climate income to households.

• This, along with advancing awareness of Article 6.8, will be part of our work with the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition in 2025.

• We will also continue and expand our efforts to support a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is such an important missing piece of the international legal landscape.

• We will also build on the 2024 Reinventing Prosperity Report, Beyond the Horizon: Priorities for a Livable Future, which drew on more than a year of detailed stakeholder inputs from around the world.

A note for the new year

As we start the year 2025, one quarter of the way through this decisive century, global heating pollution is still expanding, global heating is rapidly getting worse, and the impacts of climate change are causing more harm and cost in every region of the world.

• The number of people facing chronic and acute food insecurity is at record levels, globally—meaning every day at this moment constitutes a humanitarian emergency.

• Food production in already food-stressed regions is being cut back by climate change, with devastating effects to farming communities and the stability of nations.

• Developing countries subject to extreme climate vulnerability and massive costs for disaster management and rebuilding are made more vulnerable by crushing debt burdens.

• Los Angeles, California, and the surrounding region, are suffering catastrophic, out-of-control wildfires, made worse by conditions making dangerous fires more likely to spread.

Beyond the geophysical and human impacts of climate change, disinformation is also spreading, as political and economic frustrations elevate populist politicians more focused on hardline messaging than solving multigenerational challenges. This atmosphere of calamity only underscores the foundational importance of responsible climate civics.

In this new year of worrying trends and spreading threats to human security and wellbeing, we invite our friends and allies to put aside despair and disinformation, in favor of responsible civics to shape our world. We can overcome backward forces by working together to help communities and leaders solve problems and map the path to a livable future.