The SB64 round of UN Climate Change negotiations will provide important opportunities for nations to reduce risks from destructive practices and maximize opportunity related to sustainable, climate-resilient development. While the process is highly technical and bureaucratic, nearly all areas of human activity can see increased risk if the talks do not lead to constructive cooperation and real-world problem-solving.

Earth Civics briefing notes help to frame the landscape of risk and opportunity:

As we reported in our brief ‘Turning ideas into action’:

We need to do much more than our institutions are structured to do, and most countries do not have a coherent strategy for evolving institutions rapidly, transparently, cohesively, and cost-effectively. Instead, we have seen dismantling of urgently needed aid funds and agencies, and a costly diversion of resources to military and technology priorities that do not reduce the worsening atmosphere of threat, harm, and cost.

This process of doing more than our institutions are structured to do will require new thinking about national priorities, business models, financing strategies, and how we define prosperity.

The process of designing and securing a livable future is becoming more complicated as time passes, because negative impacts are compounding each other’s effects. Year after year, the community of nations comes together to discuss the optimal way forward, to advance everyday prosperity while also building resilience and ensuring practices and priorities are sustainable.

Get a sense of the evolving UN Climate Change process and of Paris Agreement implementation through our past dispatches and progress reports.

We recommend international negotiations around climate, energy, food, health, and other sustainability priorities, consider ways to mobilize in the following areas of action: 

1. Open insight-sharing – Welcome stakeholders to the table; invite an open sharing of concerns, priorities, solutions, and visions for a cooperative crisis response, to reduce the time lag required to develop the needed innovations. 
2. Data to expand opportunity – Artificial intelligence innovations should be used not to replace human talent, but to support high-quality, reliable translation of complex datasets into actionable inights for building resilience. Resilience activities should expand opportunity, including by diversifying local economies, and data should enhance this effect. 
3. Mainstreaming – Treat the Sustainable Development Goals as what they were intended to be—a dynamic, adaptable blueprint for improved human security and wellbeing, in all countries and communities. Incentivize banks and businesses that perform well against several SDGs at once. 
4. Infrastructure upgrades – All people everywhere need physical infrastructure to support communications, insight-sharing, and mobility, and infrastructure needs to evolve in the age of polycrisis. Nations can, and should, cooperate to support each other’s ability to upgrade infrastructure for resilience-building human development.
5. Food, Nature, and health – To be secure against future shocks, food systems need to improve and sustain human and planetary health. Prioritizing investments and commodities that deliver for food supply security, the health of Nature, and human wellbeing, will improve national economies and budgets and reduce risk for everyone.

We urge governments participating in the SB64 negotiations to find opportunities to work with peers and trading partners to advance climate-resilient development in a collective and compounding way. We recommend governments embrace the following standards, to ensure their policy processes are optimized to the current age of cascading risk:

1. Hold open meetings where public views are welcomed and centered.
2. Use insights from those meetings to craft participatory development plan processes.
3. Prioritize health and wellbeing of residents, to ensure investments align with local needs and outcomes.
4. Assign local or national agencies the task of identifying entry points for new skills and services.
5. Treat engagement not as an extra but as the essential tool for getting the best results.
6. Continue active, open, and ongoing civic engagement processes.

---

FEATURED IMAGE