A policy note from Earth Civics, from the June 2026 Resilient Prosperity Forum debrief on midyear climate change negotiations
The most significant factor in determining whether climate policies turn into real-world benefits is their ability to support everyday economic activities. “Mainstreaming” is the process of connecting climate policy to local needs and priorities and the activities of small and medium-sized enterprises, which comprise the majority of economic activity. In remote areas, where most incomes are dependent on some form of agriculture, micro-scale enterprises are of vital concern.
After the SB64 round of UN Climate Change negotiations, we held a small-group debrief to review four critical points of leverage for mainstreaming climate solutions:
- Diversifying local economies, including in remote and vulnerable communities;
- Climate-resilient agriculture, conservation, and sustainable development;
- Leveraging data systems to support enhanced investability and right-scaling;
- Climate-smart trade, including local and international banking, and climate resilience services.
As projected, the discussion highlighted food systems and infrastructure as essential structural imperatives for shifting to climate-resilient practices:
- Food systems solutions related to climate risk, resilience, and opportunity can serve as an anchor for everyday sustainable development and safeguard for future budget stability.
- We explored opportunities for mainstreaming through infrastructure, adaptation and resilience measures, and locally rooted cooperative de-risking and right-scaling.
The most salient insight emerging from the discussion was that jurisidctions and institutions large and small, with local or global reach, should aim to infuse climate progress into existing services. What that looks like in each case will vary, and there may be a “messy middle”—between high ambition goals and the eventual everyday living reality—where mistakes are made, lessons learned, and unexpected innovations are proven to be the most useful.
This question of unexpected innovations—those we cannot predict, which might arise from local needs, conditions, skills, and aspirations, and for which there is no pre-established market, and that do important work to solve climate-related problems—was reviewed as a matter of justice, access, sustainable development, and everyday opportunity.
- How, for instance, can marginal communities that need to innovate on the basis of city-level innovations access the technology and know-how to make modest but transformational local advances?
- Are there policy-based incentives, or financial mechanisms, that can be used to create more opportunity of this kind, to allow more places and more people to be not just beneficiaries or adopters of climate-smart practices, but innovators?
- Can existing small business support mechanisms—both those used in advanced economies and in emerging economies—be recalibrated to fit this need and to accelerate discovery and implementation?
- What role to mainstream commercial banks have in facilitating this kind of local economic diversification, and can public spending on infrastructure, food systems, public health, and disaster risk management, support them?
There was interest from stakeholders in both urban and rural landscapes in the Turquoise Nexus Initiative:
As a proposed programme of the Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Food and Agriculture for Sustainable Transformation (FAST) Partnership, the TNI will bring together governments, international organizations, research institutions, civil society, and the private sector around a common agenda for climate-resilient, water-centered agriculture and food systems. It will aim to enable developing countries to embed integrated food-water-climate approaches into their nationally determined contributions and Paris Agreement implementation efforts.
Earth Civics has advocated for integrating regenerative agriculture and agroecological land use practices, with watershed management and ecosystem restoration, to create investable opportunities for summit to seabed resilience-building. Downstream communities, as well as coastal and marine ecosystems, can benefit from clean farming practices upstream, which not only avoid pollution but support more resilient and healthier ecosystems and watersheds.
Infrastructure can be engineered to serve multiple overlapping needs, to support transit, water management, data gathering and distribution, access to markets, intermediary services, international ports, and financing. The right composition of local, regional, and national policy and incentive structures can, and should, serve climate, biodiversity, food, health, and development objectives.
On questions addressed in Bonn, in relation to financing of water systems, ocean health, ecosystems, and poverty eradication, participants in our debrief unanimously called for agricultural investments that support progress in all of these areas by rewarding small-scale producers for regenerative and agroecological practices and for related benefits to human and planetary health.
A suggestion was made that the emerging Good Food Finance Co-Investment Platform (CIP), intended to support sustainable food security and climate-resilient development, include coordinating and business model design functions that facilitate adoption of climate-smart practices, reducing risk for stakeholders downstream, including public authorities, builders, farms, and businesses.
It was also suggested that a strategy be developed for linking climate data and information about water resources to targeted financial mechanisms, to make it easier to show that specific investments are not only building climate resilience but also delivering measurable benefits to human health and to related areas of public spending and costs to consumers. Could the CIP provide such insights to small businesses, while adjusting financial arrangements and linking to international climate finance flows?
The next Resilient Prosperity Forum event will examine:
- Key points of progress on the way to the COP31 round of negotiations in Türkiye;
- Emerging financial innovations, including the CIP and similar mechanisms, to support climate-smart practices;
- Examples of mainstreaming, in which climate progress is infused into local economies;
- Priority investments for infrastructure, farming, and banking services that support climate progress.
