Reinventing Prosperity 2025: Tools for Transcending Crisis

The 2025 Reinventing Prosperity Report exames 7 dimensions of polycrisis & suggests ways to ensure local economies have adaptive capacity, agency & resources to reduce risk & build resilience.

Oct 30, 2025

The Principles for Reinventing Prosperity were shaped by a consultative process, in recognition of the fact that systemic realities are not aligned with the best-case future, and yet, the future is in our hands. The principles focus on foundational leverage for creating a world that works for everyone:

We are all future-builders.
Health is a fabric of wellbeing and value.
Resilience is a baseline imperative.
Leave no one behind.
Design to transcend crisis.
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:

How multifaceted and fine-tuned are the metrics used by decision-makers to determine whether a given choice increases or erodes overall resilience?
Are incentives that shape flows of new investment putting destructive or sustainable practices first?
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.