Briefing note for the 2025 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund
From Climate Civics and the Climate Value Exchange
What are we doing?
2025 has been so far a time of deep turmoil, destabilizing long-standing alliances, financial markets, trade relations, food prices, and vast reservoirs wealth. Across the world, future-building potential is at risk or vanishing, and there is fear of a prolonged period of compounded instability.
Some vital insights are shaping discussions at the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
- The first is that the whole world recognizes that the World Bank and IMF have consistently reinforced American influence, regardless of ideological trends in Washington. It would be foolish for any U.S. government to let that go, whatever their ideological pretentions might be.
- Another is that the mathematics of public budgets and economic development are becoming much more complex, due to structural nonlinear, compounding threats, including climate disruption, unsustainable debt, Nature loss, and income inequality. It is important to note that IMF projections for 2025 and 2026 show income inequality worsening between advanced economies and low-income countries.
- Healthy trade relationships must be bolstered by alignment in financial regulations and banking practices, and by a commitment to diligent upkeep of cooperation agreements, and recognition that partner countries can support each other’s success in new and evolving ways.
- Sudden, sweeping cuts to foreign aid are creating major threats to human security, economic and political stability, and could undermine international peace and security. Millions of lives are at risk, and that needs to be addressed. As will be considered by the Development Committee, in such an environment, multilateral assistance and cooperation is more important than ever.
There have been several important discussions this week, in New York, Washington, London, and elsewhere, about the fact that the United States is a market economy. Whether the U.S. continues to drive climate progress, or takes a backward turn that could cost the world hundreds of trillions of dollars in pointless waste and harm, will be determined by the whole of society, not by Soviet-style central planning.
Enhanced multilateral cooperation has already been invited in Article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement, which calls for integral and holistic “non-market” approaches (not involving emissions trading) through which groups of countries support each other’s progress on climate risk reduction and resilience-building, and toward poverty eradication and sustainable development. Climate-smart trade and finance are the logical results.
Design to Transcend Crisis
On Thursday, in a high-level IMF panel on navigating uncertainty, we heard key leaders explain how they are working to craft the policy response to this moment of turmoil that will provide measurable returns in the short, medium, and long terms.
- The UK Chancellor of the Exchecquer talked about boosting private capital supply and restarting stalled trade with the European Union.
- Germany’s Minister of Finance talked about investing in infrastructure, security, and innovation.
- Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation and Transformation argued for streamlining bureaucracy.
- There was consensus that while serious threats must be faced, there is opportunity in leading a cooperative response to crisis.
IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva emphasized the importance of not panicking, and of focusing on expanding the water in the proverbial glass. If there is 37% risk of recession, invest in the 63% probability that positive economic outcomes can emerge from this moment. What matters is to make the right choices, do math honestly, and defend core values and principles.
The 2025 Reinventing Prosperity Report will focus on the principle of designing to transcend crisis. While the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic emergency are behind us, we have not emerged from the period of polycrisis, in which long-standing norms are threatened and public budgets are both increasingly stressed and increasingly needed.
The need to navigate an unprecedented moment of polycrisis, compounded by policy-driven uncertainty, means that those governments that can are investing more, to build a foundation for future security, opportunity, and wellbeing. Others are focusing on how to reallocate resources, reform institutions, and restructure debt burdens, to ensure they can quickly follow.
The key takeaway is that the policy response for this moment cannot be more of the same, and it cannot be a knee-jerk reaction to bad news. Executive administrations cannot act alone; they must work with stakeholders and constituents, and rely on cooperative leadership from representative legislatures. Those that do will be best positioned to craft the policies that are not only best suited for navigating this moment of disruption, but for investing in strategic priorities that will have lasting benefits and co-benefits.
Green Finance is Future Finance
Climate-smart trade is futureproofed investment and commerce. Green finance is future finance. Without active resilience strategies, financial institutions will see ever-worsening risks and cost, which will impede their ability to make smart investments to maximize their overall value-creation.
We wish to highlight here the major areas of work outlined in our 2024 report Beyond the Horizon: Priorities for a Livable Future.
- Overlapping action insights can help us navigate this crucial moment of risk and fragility.
- The Zero Harm Standard can redefine how we think about, invest in, and work toward collective security, opportunity, and wellbeing.
- We must redefine risk to foster resilience; leverage systems and practices that allow everyone to become a resilience leader.
- Updating innnovation timeframes is essential right now, because resilience-building efforts are behind schedule.
- Food systems connect to everything. Not only should we improve nutrition access and affordability; we can build strong future economies on the basis of health-building sustainable food systems.
- Solidarity is a liberating force, which means good governance is not optional; it must be the norm, and everyone has a right to quality information.
- Activating the Sustainable Development Goals, whatever the industry, country context, or political environment, will improve lives and livelihoods.
- Sustainable finance can and should become the mainstream norm.
How progress is made in each of these areas will depend on the attention given to the others. The increasing complexity of human economic, industrial, and information systems, brings great opportunity, but only if major strategic choices are made with the full spectrum of interacting considerations in mind.
The need for climate-smart food systems
This week, together with GIFSEP, Climate Civics and the Climate Value Exchange announced the creation of a new Climate Action and Food Systems Alliance (CAFSA.net). The reason is simple: Food systems are facing ever-increasing pressures, and all aspects of the polycrisis—pandemic risk, climate and Nature disruption, inflation, conflict, and obstacles to open trade—are making it harder to reliably secure future food supplies. That needs to change.
Climate-smart food systems innovation provides the best opportunity to change the economic prospects, questions of practical access and affordability, and to reverse worsening threats to macrofiscal stability. Many will remember in mid-2020, the miles-long lines of SUVs in parts of the United States, as people who clearly had means had no practical way to access food affordably, aside from emergency food-distribution centers. Today, due to conflict, climate, other drivers of displacement, and shock aid cuts, hundreds of millions of people around the world face far more dire circumstances than that.
As noted above, food systems connect to everything. When we assessed the opportunity for major global progress in 2025, with a focus on the COP30 round of United Nations Climate Change negotiations in Belém, Brazil, just over 6 months from now, we identified trade, food, Nature, data, and finance, as vital areas of potential progress. We noted that:
The biggest untapped opportunity in global business is the consistent delivery of economic value that is safe and healthy for ecosystems and for clean air and water. The easiest way to create new added value at scale is to improve whole industries’ or national economies’ performance on restoration and conservation of nature. Doing so can build local economies, improve livelihoods, reduce health expenditures, and increase overall productivity.
For this reason, CAFSA will support insight-sharing and practical progress toward deep regenerative agriculture. Agroecological land use strategies can bring crucial win-win opportunities that produce better outcomes for nature—which can be measured, tracked, and supported with both public and private investment—and diversified development pathways for vulnerable, remote, and front-line communities.
The specific operational strategies that allow agroecology to become a mainstream practice differ in important ways from industrialized agriculture.
- Of critical importance is access to Earth systems data, to allow for planting and land stewardship that is both optimized to local circumstances and capable of building investable value.
- Local economies can diversify with the emergence of specialized small and medium-scale intermediaries, who effectively translate data into finance and investments into results that benefit human development and planetary health.
- Connecting urban food systems to rural landscapes and regenerative land use practices and related business models is another key step in developing mainstream climate-resilient food systems.
The role of Artificial Intelligence
There is no getting around the fact that generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) platforms are creating new structural pressures that could fundamentally alter everyday economics and job creation. The question is how will this play out, and will the changes make the world a more livable and prosperous place, or a more unstable one.
The great concern is that where gen AI systems might “enhance productivity” for large companies and financial actors, that productivity will be limited to enhanced financial return on reduced investment in labor. Reduced investment in labor means fewer jobs, paying less, and a realignment of “productivity” to marginalize human development. Such a scenario could be catastrophic for the health of the macroeconomy in consumer-driven economies, and for the everyday resourcing of local experience.
Instead, AI-focused start-ups—large and small—should aim to provide value-building services that make it easier to push new investment into the human economy. A key area of need is in tailored, multifaceted data systems integration, in line with essential standards:
- Processing disparate datasets so they can produce aligned, factual, and actionable guidance, with zero possibility of “confabulation”;
- Considering the human element at all levels—human security, freedom, rights, and opportunity;
- Wellbeing, understood in an integral and holistic way—including human health, planetary health, and everyday thriving;
- Emphasis on end-user applications that expand rewards for research, creative work, and new value-building professional work;
- Mechanisms for oversight and redress, including independent auditing capabilities, to avoid commercial conflicts of interest around security risks and quality of work product.
The Macrocritical Resilience Moment
As we noted in a 2016 article on macrocritical resilience and in an April 2020 update, since before Christine Lagarde gave her Nazca Lines speech in at the Annual Meetings in Lima, the IMF has looked at macrocritical drivers of value-creation and resilience as putting significant pressure on public budgets. Over time, our Resilience Intel initiative developed into an outline of the need for an integrated Resilience Value metric.
The intricacies of the present moment are of such far-reaching consequence, it is now clear that institutions at all levels, from multilateral finance institutions to local small businesses, need to develop macrocritical resilience strategies. Whether they use such language, or something more mundane, like climate resilience, climate security, or already mainstream terms like insurance and logistics, new tools are needed.
A crucial step for governments is to move beyond the original, relatively narrow focus of Nationally Determined Contributions and National Adaptation Plans, in line with the Paris Agreement, and move to economy-wide national climate action plans. Doing so will help to unlock the potential of Article 2.1(c) of the Paris Agreement, which calls for aligning all financial flows with the goal of preventing dangerous climate change.
It is also clear that the private sector—encompassing large and small businesses, banks, nonprofits, community groups, and health facilities—needs real-time insight-sharing and directional tools, to better understand the hidden value questions that are not showing up in conventional market indicators. In other words, we need to be able to know that a choice will add or substract overall structural value, going forward, regardless of what its financial performance might look like.
The reason this is so crucial is that some of the most lucrative sectors, in terms of financial gain, are actively destroying the value-base provided by Nature, by human health and ingenuity, by infrastructure not managed by the private sector, by our overall access to proven and emerging knowledge and evidence. We can overcome such value-destruction, if we make the right choices, to build value more holistically.
Blue Notes 