The Active Value Trust Rating system (AVTR or Activv) is intended to serve as the consumer-side equivalent of the credit rating system banks use to judge whether a person should have access to financial services, and at what cost.
The Activv rating system is designed to provide policy-makers, regulators, investors, consumers, and the rated institutions themselves, with more reliable information about projected future investment quality (FIQ), to build a reliably productive business model attuned to future value-building opportunities.
Activv ratings are not yet operational; they are in development and will roll out in phases. Priority metrics will be:
- Activv beta—a first look at the integrated Active Value rating, including Core Trust scores and insights into sustainability and resilience disclosures;
- Resilience Value—assessing macrocritical risk and resilience impacts and influences;
- RV subsidiary values—including food systems sustainability, nature benefits, diversified opportunity, improvements to livelihoods, adaptive capacity, and other factors across the SDGs and the ACCESS to GOOD and WEAVE frameworks;
- Fiscal Resilience—adapting Resilience Value to assess impact on fiscal stability, noting stark warnings from the CFTC and FSOC, the ongoing work of central banks through the NGFS, and debt-sustainability provisions of the Sevilla Commitment agreed at FFD4;
- ENCAR—Economy-wide National Climate Action Record assessments, including Fiscal Resilience and Resilience Value ratings linked to policies, budgets, risks, and impacts;
- Consumer Experience—adding direct consumer inputs and other subjective analysis to cross-reference service-offerings and value-creation strategies to determine the degree to which end users are valued;
- AVTR—the integrated Active Value Trust Rating considering impacts on customers, communities, society, nature, and future generations, in line with Core, RV, FR, ENCAR, and CE metrics.
From Resilience Intel to Active Value
Read the history
The Resilience Intel initiative was launched in 2017, to begin two parallel projects:
- Mapping the landscape of climate-smart finance, beyond the narrow category of 100% climate-focused finance;
- Building tools to discover and report insights about macrocritical resilience value—benefits that support foundational and enduring value creation.
The climate-smart finance aggregation work was discontinued when mainstream projects run by allies and like-minded institutions succeeded in establishing new standards and detailed reporting. These included the sustainability-linked finance aggregation work of the Climate Bonds Initiative and the Climate Policy Initiative’s climate finance mapping work, as well as the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance, and projects like the Catalytic Climate Finance Facility and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
The Resilience Intel Charter identified the need to measure hidden value and specified:
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.
To achieve this, the Charter established six principles for enhanced resilience intelligence:
- Show the resilience value of any kind of spending or financial instrument.
- Build science-based resilience intelligence, across whole economies, to provide actionable insight to financial and political decision-makers.
- Inform economy-wide national climate action plans (ENCAP), leveraging the catalytic value added from locally rooted clean development and cross-sector collaboration.
- Incentivize climate-smart agricultural practices, sustainable stewardship of water resources (including the upstream and downstream components of a health ocean economy), clean air, and other core supports for a healthy human relationship to natural systems.
- Catalyze public-private partnerships to ensure ongoing expanded collaboration for higher-resolution integration of Earth systems insights into economic analyses and knowledge-sharing systems.
- 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.
Those early concepts developed into projects focused on Resilience Value, Climate Value, and the Whole-Earth Active Value Economy.
- Resilience Value has evolved from general theory into a set of clear parameters that can help to build an multidimensional macrocritical resilience metric.
- The concept of Climate Value began as a call for a DECIDE climate intelligence platform and evolved into The Climate Value Exchange—a partnerships platform aimed at supporting international cooperation to accelerate climate-resilient trade and development.
- Food-related macrocritical insights—the recognition that no economy and no nation can endure without sustainable affordable food supplies—developed into the Integrated Data Systems Initiative, hosted by the Good Food Finance Network.
- The Whole-Earth Active Value Economy (WEAVE) knowledge graph provided an important leap forward in resilience insight: In 2020, it demonstrated that reduced access to resilience insights corresponds to materially reduced adaptive capacity.
Each of these areas of pathbreaking insight from the Resilience Intel initiative have contributed to the creation of new, focused research and development toward multidimensional resilience insights. The Climate Value Exchange and Good Food Finance Network will carry forward their own relevant work.
Resilience Intel is now transforming into the Active Value Network, to focus on developing all relevant non-financial insights into an Active Value Trust Ratings system.
ActiveValue.org and its Active Value Trust Rating (AVTR) system are projects of Geodesiq Strategies, founded and led by Joseph Robertson, who established Resilience Intel and has been involved in each of the related initiatives and coalitions. The purpose of the Active Value project is to develop the multidimensional metrics and multistakeholder consortium needed to make AVTR a fully functional, actionable insight platform, to inform decisions by consumers, government, investors, and institutions.
Contact us for more information about the Active Value rating process or to inquire about joining the Active Value Trust Rating consortium.
