The 2025 Reinventing Prosperity Report
The Principles for Reinventing Prosperity were established in 2020, through a consultative process focused on the adverse conditions facing people in communities across the world, during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. The pandemic revealed weaknesses in local and national civic structures and in the dynamics of markets and industries. For many people, this manifested as scarcity; others experienced violence and corruption.
The six principles focus on foundational leverage for creating a world that works for everyone. They all link back to the idea that no one should suffer preventable harm, and people affected by a decision should contribute local insights and personal values to the process of making that decision. Together, the six principles point to a flexible, context-based approach to ensuring human security and building value holistically:
- 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.
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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. Decent work and dignified inclusive processes are the foundational design elements for a livable future.
One of the startling facts of the current geopolitical environment is that—while we face a large number of threats to long-term human security and wellbeing—much of the attention of governments and major institutions in 2025 has been focused on responding to crises of the moment. This trend has further eroded public trust in governing institutions, in countries across the world.
Restoring trust is partly about measuring value creation more honestly, partly about honestly working to address and overcome injustice, and partly about public authority being used to improve conditions for the most vulnerable. Where these ways of working falter, trust erodes, and it becomes more difficult to resolve and prevent crisis.
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.
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.
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.
Earth Diplomacy Leadership in the COP30 round of negotiations
Due to decades of inaction, the community of nations needs to deliver upgraded, economy-wide national climate-resilient development strategies, find ways to activate local economies, leverage climate-smart trade and vulnerability-sensitive debt relief, and establish a new standard for international cooperation that supports better outcomes for all.
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.
Civic Renewal
Technology is not enough to create conditions for this kind of multidimensional sustainable investment breakthrough. We need data, and new tools and practices, and insight-sharing platforms and new financial services and related technologies, but we also need ways for people to connect with each other, in the real world, in real time, and over time, to build trust and to ensure learning is happening organically, in a rooted and relevant way that is optimized to generate the best outcomes locally.
Autocracy is poorly suited to the need for ongoing adaptive capacity. The first thing autocracy does is to attempt to suppress or refute inconvenient information. The resilience economy will need to value, reward, and leverage such information, and that will require more openness and collaborative innovation.
We noted earlier that trust is declining across the world. Criticism of political leaders and institutions for being ‘backward-looking dinosaurs’—out of touch and out of date—is increasingly common. Some put all of the blame on social media and its tendency to disrupt our attention and induce us to reflexively claim knowledge, when we have only begun to explore a given question, but the underlying complaint is often about the fact that people are not being heard, that institutions seem to ignore lived reality.
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.
International Cooperation
Now, more than ever, all nations need to find ways to activate and benefit from the provisions of paragraph 8 of Article 6 of 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.
A few key insights stand out as being essential to effective capitalization on the many opportunities inherent in this kind of cooperation:
- ‘Non-market’ means without trading emissions (which would modify two or more nations’ carbon accounting).
- Most areas of the everyday economy can benefit from non-market climate cooperation.
- That means non-market cooperation is essential to “mainstreaming” climate-resilient development and sustainable investment practices.
- Article 6.8 specifically invites this by calling for efforts that support “sustainable development and poverty eradication, in a coordinated and effective manner, including through, inter alia, mitigation, adaptation, finance, technology transfer and capacity-building, as appropriate.”
- It also calls for “coordination across instruments and relevant institutional arrangements”.
- This is powerful, because it recognizes implicitly that nations must not reduce climate ambition by leaving climate out of other areas of international negotiation or everyday investment.
- Small things we take for granted depend on the actions of people and industries far away; even our access to water and food depends on nations working together to stop the loss of vital natural systems.
Loss of mountain glaciers will disrupt everything
Loss of the mountain cryosphere—glaciers and snowpack—is a climate tipping point we do not talk about enough. Loss of mountain glaciers could be a major climate resilience tipping point, because once they are gone, ecosystems and watersheds will be fundamentally altered, which will further disrupt climate conditions downstream.
As with so many aspects of the sustainable transformation puzzle, it is not necessary to seek or establish a “global regime” to improve international cooperation for sustainable human development. What is necessary is that the best ideas be allowed to circulate freely, that nations work to build value together, instead of seeking to deny each other ready access to resources, and that successful examples of cooperative problem-solving at different scales be replicated where appropriate, in ways that are appropriate to all involved.
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.
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.
Adaptive design thinking can rewire systems for success
With disaster costs reaching record levels, draining more and more money from public budgets and consumers’ pockets, we 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 Resilient Prosperity Forum
The Climate Value Exchange will convene a Resilient Prosperity Forum—a series of virtual, hybrid, and in-person meetings to support insight-sharing about ways to align policy and investment with climate risk and resilience considerations, to maximize opportunities for improved outcomes in local context.
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