The International Court of Justice has found that the right to a clean and healthy environment and the right to climate protection are inherent in other human rights. Transcendent, irreducible human rights are the foundation of legitimate law and governance. According to the Court, the obligation of governments to act to reduce climate-related risk and harm is rooted in specific treaties, but also in customary international law and in fundamental human rights. The treaties and other agreements...

More and more, the news of the day seems to indicate an ongoing corrosion of our public institutions. Judges are allowing vast abuses to play out, on the premise that they can be challenged later. The consequence is the massive destruction of federal agencies, degradation of safeguards against corruption, violations of the labor rights of hundreds of thousands of civil servants, and mafia-style coercion of private universities. Today, we see the second attempt by Donald Trump to deploy the mil...

Much ink and light has been spilled over the backlash against ESG (which is shorthand for standards and ratings that measure performance on environmental, social, and governance value-building). Political campaigns have been fought over the idea that somehow having access to this information limits our freedom. Of course, the opposite is true: The better the information we have, the more detailed and precise, the more informed we can be in making good choices. The exercise and defense of freedo...

The study of economics started as a way of describing the activities and exchange of valued goods and services that make a society function. The implicit goal of the new area of inquiry was to show that some behaviors have more value than others, and to show that the entire landscape of interactions was part of the whole. While Adam Smith wrote of The Wealth of Nations, it was also true that early economists were interested in understanding, and improving, the health of societies facing increasi...

The Principles for Reinventing Prosperity emerged from a process of consultation with stakeholders and climate organizers dealing with deep local disruptions from the COVID pandemic throughout 2020. The Principles consider the material interests of people, Nature, and whole societies, to inform sustainable development and investment, and secure a livable future. Ocean health and resilience is part of that. The 2022 Reinventing Prosperity Report focused on a ‘Capital to Communities’ approach t...

There is limited time for the world to address, stop, and solve ongoing climate disruption. We are living through the hottest days in the history of our species. Many of the systems we depend on for life as we know it to function safely show signs of breaking down. Ocean currents are slowing. Jet streams are fragmenting. It is increasingly likely multiple breadbasket regions will see catastrophic harvest collapse simultaneously at some point in the next 10 to 20 years. Impacts are arriving and ...

Last year, a landmark study found that wildfires in the American west have become four times larger and occur three times as frequently than in the year 2000. The paper was led by the University of Colorado at Boulder, written by Virginia Iglesias, Jennifer K. Balch, and William R. Travis, and published in the journal Science Advances. Smoke from the East Troublesome Fire blankets Route 34 exiting Rocky Mountian National Park. Photo credit: Evan Wise. Researchers found that large fires were ...

The 2023 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund present what may be the most significant moment of opportunity since the 1940s to enact major structural change to improve development finance arrangements and outcomes. Whether this momentum for transformation is harnessed or missed will depend on whether formal decisions provide real future leverage for: Valuing investments that reduce vulnerability and enhance macrocritical resilience; differentiating in multiple dim...

On Saturday, March 4, at United Nations Headquarters in New York, two decades of negotiations culminated in the first global agreement to protect and conserve biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). In other words, international law now aims to protect life on “the high seas”—areas of ocean more than 200 miles from shore. Without this new BBNJ Agreement—also known as the High Seas Treaty, or Ocean Biodiversity Treaty—it would not have been legally or practically feasi...

One year ago last Friday, Vladimir Putin sent Russian military forces into Ukraine, where they have carried out a nonstop campaign of war crimes. The atrocities committed in Putin’s illegal war are crimes against all human beings everywhere. With all the horrors of this criminal war, it is possible to summarize the overall situation as follows: The Ukrainian people are heroic for their solidarity, their resistance, and their defense of human rights and the rule of law. Their response to terro...

Global heating and related climate disruption are happening faster than expected. We are seeing the effects of climate pollution, like warmer air and water, ice loss, prolonged droughts, year-round wildfire seasons, and rising sea levels, interact and compound each other's secondary effects. Rapid sea-level rise means coastal jurisdictions are generally not prepared to deal with the hard impacts of persistent flooding and unprecedented storm surges. This can result in some major population cent...

The Sustainable Development Goals are a map of future opportunity and wellbeing. It’s that simple. Since 2015, critics have fretted that the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and their 169 action-specific targets are “too complex”, “unwieldy”, or “hard to keep track of”. But three critical insights can help to correct that perception: The SDGs are a map of future opportunity and wellbeing. 193 nations agreed to implement all of them—within their borders, at all levels, and through internationa...

Value creation is a complex, multifaceted landscape of tested and potential meaning. For some, it means turning a given amount of money into more money. For others, it means creating non-financial value through smart, innovative enterprise. Then there is the macrocritical question: How much value can a given society create? And on what foundational resource base? In any negotiation, each party brings their own specific sense of value, and aims to work toward their own intended valuable outco...

Carbon pricing refers to policies that make it more expensive to pollute—ideally making polluters pay more to do business in such a way, without creating economic difficulties for everyone else. A carbon price, or price for pollution, can be applied at various points, as fuel moves through the economy: upstream (on the raw material—coal, oil, or gas); midstream (on refined and processed fuels and other products); downstream (where fuels generate emissions). Applying the price upstream is th...

The astronauts who died aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986, sacrificed their lives to the pursuit of science, in service of our common need, our common mission—to access and understand our universe, to expand our capabilities, to inform the future with evidence and its forthright cooperative application. Christa McAuliffe celebrated the way in which the Teacher in Space program had focused the nation’s attention on the noble and necessary work of teachers and school syste...

In September 2020, CCI and Resilience Intel published The Principles for Reinventing Prosperity. They constituted a stakeholder-driven approach to building back better from the COVID-19 emergency, and working towards all 17 Sustainable Development Goals and a climate-resilient future of inclusive prosperity. The 2022 Reinventing Prosperity Report emphasizes the value of engagement and participation for a ‘capital to communities’ approach to mobilizing inclusive, climate-smart sustainable financ...

Time is money. What we mean when we say that is there is value in having more time, more resources, more health and resilience, and delaying action when you have time to avoid terrible costs is unwise. The worsening risk of polycrisis—in which climate disruption, nature loss, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, food insecurity, and repeated unaffordable disasters compound and accelerate each other, and spur repeated waves of mass migration—means we must come to terms with the need for an operat...

As we face an escalating convergence of compounding risks, we find ourselves at an inflection point: We might shift human industrial systems onto a sustainable path, and so we can reliably achieve human health, wellbeing, and security, and the cooperative stability and prosperity of nation states. Or, we might fail to make the necessary changes quickly enough, and continue to see devastating costs rise, while our ability to address shocks and disasters is diminished. We need systems change...

Today marks two years since the awful, tragic, menacing assault on the United States Capitol by paramilitary extremists and a radicalized mob. We now know—from hundreds of criminal prosecutions, plea bargains and trials, hundreds of thousands of documents, an exhaustive Congressional investigation, and sworn testimony—that the violent insurrection was part of a coordinated attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power. The aim of the Capitol attackers was to use menace and force to prevent t...

In 2023, we face an opportunity unprecedented in human history. We now have more policy and financial instruments available than ever before to transform human societies and economies, to achieve real long-term sustainability. Here are a few ways we can do that. Acceleration – Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement invites countries to cooperate to accelerate climate mitigation, adaptation, resilience-building, and related sustainable development activities. Non-market approaches under Article 6.8...

Climate pollution creates real, proliferating, and compounding costs, which polluters generally are not required to pay. Climate impacts degrade ecosystems, undermine biodiversity, erode agricultural efficiency, threaten food systems, and and impose shock event costs. In doing so, they also undermine more vulnerable countries’ capacity to operate, to respond to crisis, and to develop sustainably. The effect of that spiraling degradation of capacity is a contagion of impact, destabilization, and...

Geoversiv welcomes the new pact with nature agreed by 190 nations in Montreal. We applaud the long hours and persistence through overtime negotiations of experts and diplomats working to reach the Agreement. Through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework nations will, both internally and collectively:  Protect 30% of land and water to safeguard biodiversity, by 2030; Reduce to near zero the degradation of high-sensitivity, high-value, and high-integrity ecosystems; Reduce by at le...

We are living through a decisive decade—for the future of human societies, and for the life of our species, and of millions of other species. The IPCC finds we are close to losing the possibility of successful climate-resilient development. The IPBES finds we are at risk of losing more than 1 million species in the Earth's 6th mass extinction, currently ongoing and caused by human activities and choices. Failure to prevent these losses could lead to the collapse of production in all food-growi...

One of the achievements of the COP27 climate negotiations was the agreement that international financial institutions should undergo comprehensive reform, to be better structured for climate crisis response. Calls for ‘shifting the trillions‘ go back many years: In May 2015, then UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres told finance ministers, central bank governors, CEOs and analysts, gathered for the Climate Finance Day in Paris, that climate finance should not be a niche concern; no m...

Much ink and screenlight has been spilled to make the case that integrity unravels, order breaks down, and the complexities of cooperative self-government are too arduous to remain in fashion. While it is everyday shockingly evident that imperfect leaders do prioritize their own power over the success of their societies, we may in fact be entering an age defined more by solidarity than by human failing. What evidence is there for such a claim? Let's look at the challenges we face: The climat...

When the COVID pandemic disrupted lives and livelihoods across the world, Citizens' Climate International held regular consultations with our network of citizen stakeholders around the world. The result was a common understanding that multiple converging crises were going to cause deep and possibly permanent changes in the local experience of countless people. Addressing fear, insecurity, and uncertainty, would require careful planning—not only around COVID safety and economic recovery, but als...

The health of nature is integral to human health and security. There are many reasons human beings have sought through civilization, agriculture, and technology, to create barriers against the perils of a wild natural world. This does not mean we are secure in our humanness if nature is not also secure in being what it needs to be. As we approach Part II of the 15th Conference of the Parties for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD15), taking place in December in Montreal, Canada, we a...