When we talk about the health and wellbeing of our planet, we are talking about our planet’s ability to provide conditions for our health and wellbeing. Earth is under unprecedented stress from unsustainable industrial activities, which overconsume nonrenewable resources and degrade natural systems. 

As we reported at Earth Civics this week:

Climate change, Nature loss, and pollution, are all affecting human health and wellbeing, everywhere. The costs of those impacts are rising, spreading, interacting, and compounding. Most consumer goods and services now carry embedded planetary crisis costs. We ignore the Triple Planetary Crisis at our peril.

Around the world, people are now facing the very stark and imminent threat that narrow-minded short-term thinking, unaccountable self-interested decision-making, and outright greed, will degrade their future chances of everyday human security and wellbeing. 

In a report on strategies for avoiding proportional climate risk, the Active Value Trust Ratings platform has reported: 

• Human activity is causing disruption of Earth’s climate system, dangerous pervasive plastic pollution, and the collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems.
• These violations of planetary boundaries—the upper limit for what Earth can sustain in a number of critical areas—are putting supplies of fresh water, nutritious food, and affordable goods across the economy, at risk.
• The state of general multi-decadal human health most societies now expect may soon be unaffordable or unachievable for nearly all human beings, regardless of income levels.

This is why in November 2025, during the most recent round of global climate negotiations, we called for recognition of a Zero Harm standard as the transformational goal around which to organize climate policy, incentives, and investments. 

Recognizing the universal human right to a clean, healthy environment, and the repeatedly restated global commitment to ensure “the integrity of all ecosystems, including in forests, the ocean, mountains and the cryosphere, and the protection of biodiversity”, with planetary crisis risk spreading to all regions, a commitment to zero preventable harm to people and ecosystems is the common sense high-ambition goal.

In that briefing note, we observed that:

To empower people across the diverse range of human experience, to adapt successfully, and to prevent danger and establish conditions for successful climate-resilient development, the zero harm standard must begin to play a constant role in the work of imagining the best possible future and working toward it, together.

Resilient prosperity is attainable. To achieve it, we will need to welcome the contributions of conscience, talent, and imagination of anyone wishing to build a better future. This means the most powerful institutions will need to be more open, more accountable, and more collaborative.

In 2026, we have seen tragedy in communities from Minnesota to Ukraine, to Iran and Nigeria. We have also seen how civic capital—the spontaneous cooperation of neighbors assisting each other in the midst of crisis—can change outcomes and save lives. And, we have seen how daring, principled, no-nonsense, cooperative acts of scientific exploration can unite people of widely differing views and interests.

We need a recommitment to the big cooperative endeavor of securing progress for people in all circumstances. This is what gives meaning to institutions and to innovations. 

Innovations lose meaning and legitimacy when they accelerate the depletion of irreplaceable resources. Sustainable wellbeing and responsible stewardship are implicit expectations of any effort at human progress. 

This Earth Day, we call on all governments—at local, regional, and national levels—to commit to robust, locally rooted and practically relevant civic engagement processes that will allow communities and stakeholders to shape major institutional priorities and value-building investment decisions.

These processes should follow the Principles for Reinventing Prosperity and, where applicable, the City Food Finance Principles to Build Climate Value. They should also weigh the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits, and operate as follows:

1. Hold open meetings where public views are welcomed and centered.
2. Use insights from those meetings to craft participatory development plan processes.
3. Prioritize health and wellbeing of residents, to ensure investments align with local needs and outcomes.
4. Assign local or national agencies the task of identifying entry points for new skills and services.
5. Treat engagement not as an extra but as the essential tool for getting the best results.
6. Continue active, open, and ongoing civic engagement processes. 

No one alive stops being affected by our collective relationship to the Earth’s life-sustaining systems; civic engagement to ensure that relationship is sustainble should not end either. Honest evaluation of hidden costs and co-benefits, in line with local needs and human health and safety, can ensure new investments add enduring real-world value to local economies, with stabilizing effects for local and national budgets.

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