Active Value

The Resilience Intel Charter was released during an event in San Francisco, on September 12, 2018, during the Global Climate Action Summit. Its purpose was to establish foundational guidelines for a diverse, decentralized, global effort to develop actionable insights for reducing climate-related risk and supporting resilient means for people, communities, and nations to enhance opportunity, security, and wellbeing.

Earth Civics and the Climate Value Exchange are republishing the Resilience Intel Charter, with added context from observed planetary health risks and worsening impacts on people, communities, and the fiscal stability of nations.

• Resilience Intel established the need for reliable, diversified XROI data, outlining External Returns on Investment.
• It began a process of quantifying the overall body of climate-related financing, including embedded and fractional mainstream financing. 
• It proposed the WEAVE approach to measuring operational resilience, measuring the known, published contacts between Whole Earth Active Value Economy insights and a particular institution or jurisdiction. 
• These breakthroughs have led to creation of the Active Value Trust Ratings (AVTR) project and the Networked Earth System Science Initiative (NESSI). 

The WEAVE experiment has been picked up by Active Value, which has identified 121.6 quadrillion permutations across the interactive landscape among just 19 dimensions of human experience involving Nature. Complexity is inherent to the way Nature provides for wellbeing; we need to get comfortable with the complex flows of information and non-financial value that determine whether we are safe, free, or secure.

In 2026, it is impossible to accurately measure the value of any transaction, without knowing at least some structural and relational information about the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits (BHC). Active Value, NESSI, and the quest for BHC insights that can be used by individuals, communities, commercial entities, financial institutions, and jurisdictions, to make better choices, are an extension of the Resilience Intel effort.

We reiterate the Charter’s call for 100% climate-smart finance by 2038, given that warnings in 2018 that climate change was accelerating suggested major strucutral elements of the climate system could fail before 2040 if rapid progress was not made. 100% climate-smart finance means mainstream financial arrangements and markets are properly assessed against their real hidden costs or co-benefits, and the standard for all is to eliminate climate damage and foster resilience.

Below, we republish the Resilience Intel Charter, to add structural clarity to the need for this wider revolution in the development of new kinds of decision-support data. We do this, recognizing that the advent of artificial intelligence platforms greatly complicates the question of how such information can best be gathered, processed, and eventually applied by end-users. 

It is our proposition that end users are human beings, who need to be able to make conscious, informed choices, without surrendering their cognitive or moral capacities to unthinking, amoral devices. Implicit in this great new layer of the global information revolution is the need for safeguards that prioritize information integrity and the cognitive and moral sovereignty of individuals, communities, and human institutions.

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THE RESILIENCE INTEL CHARTER

Preamble: Measuring Hidden value

In any context, the word ‘value’ refers to a standard by which we can judge the quality of our work in the world. Financial and economic value should measure the health of a set of human activities, and their resilience over time. Our financial system—and so the human economy generally—selects among human activities those which most easily accumulate monetary value, in the current context. Built-in biases are reinforced, even as hidden costs accumulate. Throughout history, the hidden cost of unsustainable practices has eventually put every civilization at risk.

In today’s global civilization, our financial system selects for ready reward many kinds of industrial-scale enterprise that are not aligned with the health of natural systems. If we don’t measure the value of those natural systems, we are not able to accurately judge the quality of our work in the world. Values we don’t count in monetary terms are treated as invisible by market preference and trends.

The erosion of health and resilience in natural systems adds cost and risk across whole economies. A lack of resilience intelligence undermines real value in all areas.

We need to be able to measure the difference in value potential between practices that reinforce and protect natural systems and those that undermine and degrade them. Over time, these patterns show a clear advantage for investments that leave behind a wider foundation for the creation of value. Such investments generate external returns on investment (XROI). They are worth more to society, and so to banking and business, because they add value for all other kinds of investment.

We can describe this differentiation as ranging from low resilience value to high resilience value. By connecting Earth-systems science platforms to finance, we can measure not only climate resilience, but resilience intelligence across a wide array of macro-critical (economy-shaping) values.

‘Resilience intelligence’ is an overall term for the work of assessing how effectively we are future-proofing our businesses and our societies.

Resilience Intel: Principles, Aims & Mission

Resilience Intel is a coalition effort, intended to leverage economy-shaping insights from the fields of Earth-systems science, social sciences and economics, public and private finance, industry and community-level quality-of-life, to visualize overall resilience. By combining such diverse constellations of observation, data-tracking and insight-generation, Resilience Intel aims to:

1. Show the resilience value of any kind of spending or financial instrument.
2. Build science-based resilience intelligence, across whole economies, to provide actionable insight to financial and political decision-makers.
3. Inform economy-wide national climate action plans (ENCAP), leveraging the catalytic value added from locally rooted clean development and cross-sector collaboration.
4. Incentivize climate-smart agricultural practices, sustainable stewardship of water resources (including the upstream and downstream components of a healthy ocean economy), clean air, and other core supports for a healthy human relationship to natural systems.
5. Catalyze public-private partnerships to ensure ongoing expanded collaboration for higher-resolution integration of Earth systems insights into economic analyses and knowledge-sharing systems.
6. Stimulate new areas of mainstream banking activity intended to support the expansion of business models that harness and build Resilience Intelligence and/or Resilience Value.

Resilience Intel partners, supporters, and collaborators, will achieve this, by:

• protecting and expanding natural capital and interacting Earth-systems services,
• developing of wider pools of climate-smart finance,
• supporting the design and deployment of diversified locally rooted sustainability-driven economies, and
• investing in an integrated, multi-scale climate-smart economy.

The best possible human future is one in which climate-smart decision-making ensures we invest in the larger-than-market planetary systems that make all that we value (in numbers and otherwise) possible.

The risks associated with failing to achieve this goal are too many and too costly.

This Founding Charter for the Resilience Intel initiative expresses a shared sense of the signatories that—while all sectors, institutions, communities, and ventures will advance at different speeds—the most reasonable possible future for finance at all levels is to move toward 100% climate-smart finance within 20 years. The new standard can and so should be: fact-based, integrated, evolving, economy-wide resilience intelligence—to ensure we are not sending good money after bad, by investing (however inadvertently) in avoidable harm and cost.

Transformational Partnership

Sustainable Development Goal 17 is a call for multilevel, multistakeholder partnerships to achieve real improvements to human circumstances, across all of the Goals. The Resilience Intel initiative is a call for partnerships focused on development of resilience intelligence insights that can inform everyday decision-making in all of the ways that are consequential for the shared human project of creating stable conditions for future wellbeing of people and Nature. 

As part of the Climate Value Exchange effort to develop partnerships that accelerate climate-related risk reduction and resilient, sustainable economies, we are inviting original signatories, as well as interested institutions and coalitions to share tested insights, gained from long experience or emerging as they innovate and adapt to new pressures. Climate Value and Resilient Prosperity events through 2030 will provide a forum for highlighting and building on such innovations.