Infuse climate progress into existing services

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. 

Concepts & Applications

While examining the four levers of transformation—diversifying local economies, shifting to climate-resilient agriculture, leveraging data systems to support enhanced investability and right-scaling, and linking to climate-smart trade and banking—participants asked for a short list of potential applications, or institutional evolutions. 

The following were put forward by Earth Civics, after reviewing work by affiliated organizations and networks, and the substance of the SB64 talks:

  1. Macroeconomy Stabilization Funds 
  2. Multidimensional Metrics 
  3. Co-Investment Platforms 
  4. Cooperative De-Risking Strategies 
  5. Networking Earth System Science Insights 
  6. Incubators for Local Sustainable Finance Ventures

Macroeconomy Stabilization Funds

A reserve-holdings fund that invests to secure stocks of needed supplies and supply capacity, to bridge everyday needs and prevent price shocks, especially with regard to life-sustaining basic needs. The goal is to pool funding, financial instruments, and assets from public and private-sector, multilateral and philanthropic sources.

Multidimensional Metrics 

To operate optimally in our present age of pervasive and compounding risk, rapid change, and systemic disruption, we need to be able to assess the balance of hidden costs and co-benefits (BHC). BHC metrics play an important role in the wider process of determining where there is greater or lesser non-financial value creation, contributing to overall economic value, opportunity, and sustainability. It is also a generic term that can apply to many different versions of this process.

Co-Investment Platforms

The Good Food Finance Co-Investment Platform will aim to marshal US $10 billion of core catalytic capital from public‑sector and philanthropic sources, multilateral development finance institutions (MDFIs), and select private-sector core capital providers. A structured finance architecture will leverage 8 to 15 times more private‑sector capital, with the aim of mobilizing US $150 billion of additional private investment over ten years.

Cooperative De-Risking Strategies 

Cooperative de-risking (CDR) is a general term for a diverse range of financial and non-financial tools used to convert forecasted future savings (from avoiding harm to people and Nature) into present-day investment dollars, through integrated value-chain upgrading strategies and targeted co-investments aimed at shoring up the most vulnerable places and practitioners. An example is the Innovative Collaborative Funding Model put forward by Good Food Finance Network partners.

Networking Earth systems science insights

To achieve informational integrity, and so to establish a solid, shared foundation for informed climate-related decision-making, there is a need for well-established, innovative, and connective Earth science data systems, insight-sharing platforms, and data used by decision-makers in the public and private sectors, to connect and support mainstream science-based undertsanding of everyday problems. The Networked Earth Systems Science Initiative (NESSI) aims to achieve this.

Incubators for local sustainable finance ventures

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that specialize in creating opportunities for investors and for small and medium-scale value chain contributors aiming to support better outcomes for human and planetary health are needed. Their function is to right-scale large financial flows, including sustainability-focused bonds, fiscal stability measures, decarbonization and Nature restoration incentives, and other focused modes of financing, so they match the needs of small-scale local businesses.