Design systems to transcend emerging & ongoing crises
The 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report will focus on the need to design systems that eliminate the root causes of crisis, including climate disruption, nature loss, pandemics & disinformation.
A preview of the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity Report
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.