Reinventing Prosperity: New report looks Beyond the Horizon
Building a sustainable future is everyone's business. Our success or failure will affect all life on Earth, and so all nations. The 2024 Reinventing Prosperity report elevates stakeholders' voices.
The 2024 Reinventing Prosperity Report – a contribution from the Climate Value Exchange and partners to the United Nations Summit of the Future
When the COVID pandemic shut down societies around the world in early 2020, it became clear we needed to evaluate how well our institutions and economic structures are set up to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. This led to the development of six principles to make 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 the 2024 Reinventing Prosperity report, we note three major questions that can shape how readily any given society, including at the local level, is able to act on the Principles:
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?
Guiding Insights
Respondents to the Consultation on Priorities for a Livable Future—who contributed local perspectives and aspirations from 23 countries, across the 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.
Three of the guiding principles that stand out are:
Cooperative problem-solving is essential.
Human dignity is linked to sustainable investment.
Unsustainable investment is waste.
Zero harm
Law has legitimacy when it serves a universal human interest, provides protection for vulnerable groups, emerges from or is responsive to stakeholders and constituents, and is shaped through representative process. There is a duty to honor universal human rights and human dignity, including the right to safety and security. So, we ask that public agencies, legislatures, intergovernmental bodies, and private investors and regulators, consistently ask whether their actions honor these transcendent standards, and actively support the upholding of a zero harm standard.
Redefine Risk to Foster Resilience
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 (Lenton et al. 2023).”
Rapidly rising disaster response costs and premiums placed on imported goods in a climate-disrupted economy lead to debt distress and destabilization.
US financial regulators warn that climate costs will destabilize the financial sector and the wider economy, putting at risk the stability even of the nation with the world’s largest overall economic output.
The Potsdam Institute warned earlier this year that already baked in costs will reach $38 trillion per year by 2050.
We cited this finding in last year’s Reinventing Prosperity report on The Right to Resilience, noting that “In such a world, all of our assumptions about health, security, life expectancy, economic development, and the durability of institutions, will be long forgotten.”
And so, “The right to resilience—like human rights in general—is a golden thread that can reset the baseline for all our climate ambitions.”
Decision-makers—from government agencies to business leaders and major banks to small businesses and individual consumers—need to be able to see whether a given product or service provides some material benefit to the urgent global project of reducing risk and enhancing resilience. That means multidimensional metrics, based on data systems that connect Earth science insights to financial information, for instance, need to be developed, deployed, and mainstreamed.
The ‘Beyond the Horizon’ report includes five more chapters that detail critical elements of the work of securing a livable future:
Read the Executive Summary at climatevalue.net/rp24