The best economic future is possible, but faces major headwinds

As we approach Earth Day 2025, the conditions for long-term preservation and expansion of Climate Value are far from ideal. Below, we review some of the pressures at work in early 2025, and then point to emerging opportunities for important breakthroughs that could transform what is possible in terms of future climate-resilient prosperity.

There is alarming news on climate risk and resilience:

• Global heating emissions have reached an all-time high, increasing in 2024 by the largest margin since the 1992 global Climate Convention was agreed.
• Since the middle of last year, costly climate disasters have reached an all-time high, with two exceeding $250 billion in the United States alone.
• Deaths from climate-related causes are accelerating, though they are difficult to measure. Hunger, poverty, displacement, disease, and disasters (including prolonged extreme heat), are all contributing, even as the global crisis in plastic and toxic pollution looks set to worsen this year.
• The Food System Economics Commission estimates $138 trillion have been lost or wasted by unsustainable food systems practices in just 9 years.

Meanwhile, geopolitical forces are creating powerful headwinds, slowing down action to transition to smarter, more sustainable practices in agricultural, energy, and industrial systems.

• Blanket tariffs imposed by the new U.S. administration are breaking supply chains and disrupting vital economic alliances.
• The sudden withdrawal of funding from humanitarian, health, and scientific bodies is creating senseless hardship, with potentially devastating and destabilizing ripple effects, and undermining the pace of scientific discovery and technical innovation.
• Repeated rounds of retaliatory action on trade, especially between the U.S. and China, threaten to shut down key industrial production, including for advanced security and defense systems.
• What started as a trade standoff could turn into a risky reshaping of global security dynamics, further spreading risk of preventable harm and waste.

The race to dominate the emerging artificial intelligence (AI) space is becoming a world-shaping force of global consequence.

• Major powers expect rivals will seek to use AI to outflank and dominate them, so they are racing to get there first.
• A global effort to establish safety standards and a system of interlocking safeguards has not achieved global agreement—meaning even symbolic institutional safeguards are not yet in place.
• Instead of focusing attention on the power of machine learning to better achieve smart, reliable integration of data systems to translate Earth systems, climate risk, and resilience data into actionable insights, AI models are being trained to generate copycat text and images, testing intellectual property standards, and putting integrity of information at risk, at shocking speed.
• The data centers used to power these commercial systems are now consuming far more energy than previously understood to be possible, and the AI “gold rush” is currently inviting ever more inefficient systems to compete for the murky profits that can be achieved.

These three areas of concern point to some of the needed breakthroughs in relation to the protection and expansion of Climate Value:

1. We need deep regenerative investment strategies, which harness data and develop ever wider bases of sustainable value creation, strengthening the health and resilience of natural systems, and aligning human prosperity with them.
2. We need enhanced cooperative multilateralism—new climate-sensitive strategies for nations to work together to create expanded shared opportunity and sustainable security.
3. We need to identify sustainable, non-exploitative business models for high-value artificial intelligence to deliver living value—health and resilience—to people and to nature, and by extension to local and national economies.

Some important ideas are breaking through in these areas and will be further explored in future Climate Value Exchange events and convenings:

1. Efforts to create innovative co-investment platforms provide real opportunity for a rapid proliferation of sustainable investments, backed by both public support and private capital. 
2. Multidimensional climate cooperation, as outlined in the Paris Agreement, is emerging as an essential tool for expanding opportunity through trade that drives sustainable development. 
3. High-efficiency algorithms and catalytic computing innovations hold the potential to dramatically reduce the energy required for AI that translates Earth systems data into decision insights.

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Looking ahead to the Forum on Activating the Climate Value Economy

Climate Value is a critical missing ingredient in decisions across the economy, and at all levels of income. Essential future-building opportunities are being missed, because mainstream financial decision-making, trade policy, and industrial activity, are not aligned with reducing the risk of major shocks and building Climate Value. The collapse of core functions supporting everyday life could become a persistent problem in most societies by the end of this century, or by mid-century, for much of the world.

The Climate Value economy is a necessary future condition, if we are to enjoy the safety, security, opportunity, and prosperity we have come to expect. The Forum on Activating the Climate Value Economy will review both proven and emerging practical tools that will allow communities to grow local economies and national governments to unlock major new investment in Climate Value-building activities across the whole economy.