A contribution to the High-Level Meeting on Harmony with Nature and Living Well – United Nations Headquarters, New York, 22 April 2025

We are living in a time of unique peril and responsibility.

Our ongoing industrial excesses will have traceable effects that will continue to disrupt Earth’s optimal contributions to life and wellbeing thousands of years from now. We are now disrupting Nature so radically, we are causing the 6th known mass extinction and risking irreversible planetary change.

All life is a fabric of interconnection. We cannot separate the sanctity of human life from the grace given us by natural systems that make our planet hospitable to life. Planetary health is human health.

Conservative estimates for the costs of unchecked climate change find the world will lose at least $178 trillion by 2070. Financial regulators project fiscal disaster and economic collapse, even of the largest economies, if such risks are not curbed and reversed. The Food System Economics Commission finds we have already wasted or lost $138 trillion to unsustainable practices since the Paris Agreement was signed – 9 years ago today.

In 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns, the Climate Civics team convened weekly check-ins with people in diverse circumstances around the world. What we learned, together, in those meetings, was:

• Major disruptions are easier to address when you have allies.
• Small things snowballing into crisis far away can disrupt everything we take for granted.
• Nature encompasses everything, and we need to make sure our relationship to Nature fosters good health, everyday wellbeing, and enduring security.
• It is possible to design our crisis response to transcend crisis and set the course for a livable future, for all, which we see as the purpose and promise of an Assembly of Mother Earth.

To achieve such a world, we will need cooperative institutions that ensure our economic system never harms people or Nature. Those institutions will need to work in ways that drive progress on all of the Sustainable Development Goals through an Earth-centered understanding of health and wellbeing.

To support this process of shared discovery, Climate Civics will work with GIFSEP, the Global Initiative for Food Security and Ecosystem Preservation, and other partners, to build a new Climate Action and Food Systems Alliance (CAFSA).

To make Living Well in Harmony with Nature an achievable option for all people, our future food systems must utilize deep regenerative practices—supporting the preservation of biodiverse ecosystems and watersheds, without turning Nature into a commodity.

Only by upholding the rights of Nature can we fully and consistently defend the rights of all human beings and establish conditions for a fair, equitable, and peaceful world.

So, today, we join the call for creation of an annual Assembly of Mother Earth—to open the civic space, between nations and with local stakeholders, indigenous peoples, and other constituencies, to create conditions for recognition of the rights of Nature and rapid development of the instruments of action to honor those rights, and to build an economic system that works for all people and for all of Nature.

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NOTES

1. Deloitte’s 2022 Global Turning Point report is online at https://www.deloitte.com/global/en/about/press-room/deloitte-research-reveals-inaction-on-climate-change-could-cost-the-world-economy-us-dollar-178-trillion-by-2070.html
2. Citing reports from the U.S. Treasury, the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission: https://earthcivics.org/2025/02/21/america-needs-climate-science/
3. The Global Policy Report of the Food System Economics Commission can be found online at foodsystemeconomics.org
4. These learnings led to the creation of six Principles for Reinventing Prosperity. More information is available at https://climatevalue.exchange/principles-for-reinventing-prosperity/
5. More information about the Climate Action and Food Systems Alliance is online at CAFSA.net or climatevalue.exchange/cafsa
6. The Harmony with Nature programme is outlined at http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/
7. An essay by Climate Civics on the foundations of future peace, prosperity, and wellbeing, can be found at https://earthcivics.org/2024/11/19/foundations-of-future-peace-prosperity-wellbeing/