Insights for a time of risk & fragility
The Reinventing Prosperity Report on Priorities for a Livable Future provides insights from stakeholders around the world for navigating this crucial moment of risk, fragility, and polycrisis.
The fourth annual report on the Principles for Reinventing Prosperity sought to address three core questions:
Metrics: How multifaceted and fine-tuned are the metrics used by decision-makers to determine whether a given choice increases or erodes overall resilience?
Incentives: Are incentives that shape flows of new investment putting destructive or sustainable practices first?
Stakeholders: 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?
To open a window into how stakeholders—from a diverse range of national, local, and socio-economic circumstances—see the collective, personal, and institutional duty to create favorable conditions for future generations and the promise of enhanced multilateral cooperation to benefit local lived experience today, we asked them to share their priorities for a livable future.
A general insight running through the Consultation responses is that we find ourselves at a crucial moment of risk and fragility, in which small decisions (including delays, reversals, and acting on bad or misleading information) could have great consequence. Responses noted that consequences affect not only our own access to future wellbeing, but for generations far into the future, and for the composition and health of life on Earth.
The following is a condensed list of insights that represent stakeholders’ call for action to secure a livable future for all people and for our planet’s life-support systems.
Climate change impacts are piling up. Climate change impacts are happening now, with major costs and risks accumulating. Respondents recognize some further destabilization of the climate system is “baked in”, because some effects of global heating take time to materialize.
A livable human society requires a livable climate. A consistent future vision was one where we improve human experience by improving the behavior of nations, industries, and local economies, toward nature, watersheds, and the climate system.
Cooperative problem-solving is essential. A consistent insight was the need for nations to work together to innovate more efficiently and effectively, and to foster shared prosperity that consistently respects human rights. Without adequate cooperation, the already worsening climate and biosphere crisis will get worse, while resources are squandered dealing with chaos instead of smart solutions.
Planetary boundaries are security measures. Respondents are aware that we are breaching planetary boundaries, and that this means we are making Earth less hospitable to the lifestyles we have come to expect. The local and regional benefits of sustainable planetary systems include food security, economic development, opportunities for improvement of the human condition, security, and peace.
A sustainable future is vibrant, active, mobile, and health-building. Visions for a livable future include vibrant cities and communities, with extensive tree cover, lush natural spaces, restored and sustained biodiversity, and natural spaces integrated into the human environment, for recreation, for cycling and self-powered mobility, with cleaner air and healthier people, spending more time engaging with society in a way that is healthy, enjoyable, and safe.
Local decision-making can be decisive. For such healthy, vibrant, active, green communities to exist, local decision-making needs to avoid maladaptation—the costly condition in which decisions about future experience fail to manifest the optimal outcomes from everyday industry, ingenuity, and climate crisis response. Avoiding maladaptation means thinking carefully about how climate dynamics and the health of nature tie into everyday experience, and recognizing that communities are less livable when there is less access to nature. Sustainable cities and communities are essential to the health and wellbeing of people, national economies, and natural life-support systems, including the climate.
Human dignity is linked to sustainable investment. SDG8 focusing on Decent Work was the least highlighted SDG; this seems to be linked to respondents seeing better practices and better living conditions, with reduced poverty, reduced inequalities, improved health, and better education, as naturally leading to work that is more enjoyable, better paid, and more dignified.
Accelerated upgrading of practices must be the norm. Respondents recognize that for all of the better future visions they conceive, we are behind the curve. The IPCC 6th Assessment Report finds we will breach 1.5ºC by 2040, and will begin to lose critical stabilizing structures of the climate system above 1.5ºC, if not before. Sensible future-building investment must, then, be characterized by constant upgrading and rapid deployment of promising sustainable practices.
1.5ºC is just a start. Long-term visions for a livable future included the insight that we should, collectively, work to restore a pre-industrial climate. That does not mean leaving industry behind; it means making industry smarter and more sustainable, and sharing benefits more equitably so more people are empowered to make values-based decisions and prevent runaway resource depletion.
Wealth is not the core measure of wellbeing. Equality can mean equally able to access healthy food, quality education, health services, and to participate fully as an informed, engaged member of one’s community and of the wider society, with the same expectation of safety and security. Livable future policies can improve equality in terms of freedom from harm and opportunity to excel, recognizing that where one person’s rights are degraded, all rights are less safe.
Valuing nature, health, and safety, can expand wealth for everyone. Respondents called for policies, investments, infrastructure, business practices, and community life that manifest the value of nature, health, and safety. This means co-designing development plans and urban infrastructure, allowing for more participatory policy-making, and development of new metrics that use data to show progress in these areas of value creation.
Success in supporting human health includes the right to safe transit. No society can achieve its healthiest state if it is a place of peril for visitors, or if it is aligned against regular exchange with other cultures and geographies. People need to be welcome to move from place to place, able to access basic needs, services, and opportunity, and nations need to have migration management plans that recognize the inherent human dignity of all people and the future scale of human mobility.
New kinds of destabilization are on the horizon. Even if we achieve the best-case scenario for climate action and sustainable development, we know conditions will worsen in some regions—possibly without hope of near-term recovery. Future-building investments must recognize that this is part of our shared future, and support resilience-building and crisis-response needs.
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.
Do well by doing good. Respondents want to see more levers of action—for consumers, policy-makers, investors, and visionary new businesses—to reward those who provide goods and services of high quality, without emitting toxic or climate-disrupting chemicals into the environment, without destroying ecosystems, and without harming human health.
Good governance is imperative. Respondents recognize the need for local, national, and cooperative international governance that acts to reduce harm, eliminate risk, and spread wellbeing. Allowing or not allowing unaccountable harm to innocents is widely understood to be a measure of the quality of governance and the legitimacy of institutions. Transparency and zero tolerance for corruption are seen as essential to successfully addressing major challenges at all levels.
Key to success, according to contributors to this report, is that transformational efforts to create the industries and opportunities of tomorrow need to include the insights and talents of some of the most vulnerable communities. Without that, the fabric of trust will not be effectively restored, and progress can be lost at any time.
Read the whole report on Priorities for a Livable Future is available on the Climate Value Exchange website.
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