As the COP31 round of UN Climate Change negotiations get underway in Antalya, Türkiye, negotiators representing 195 nations are confronted with a stark and worsening problem: Global temperatures will breach 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels—a threshold reported by consensus science to represent far-reaching, costly, compounding danger, for all regions of the world. Top of mind at all times should be the fact that no further delay is economically viable.

Some nations have developed in ways that make their government revenues or mainstream economies heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Such situations are not economically viable for very long, because all people, communities, industries, and nations, have a material interest in rapidly reducing global heating pollution and transitioning to non-polluting practices.

The UNEP report Limiting Overshoot – Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return warns that major anchors of global climate stability are at risk of breaking down, including the Amazon Rainforest, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), much of the cryosphere, including mountain glaciers and significant portions of the Polar Ice Caps, and biodiverse ocean ecosystems that help the ocean absorb climate polluting carbon compounds.

Water and food supplies are at risk, both in arid, vulnerable regions, and in wealthy, industrialized countries. Much of what we take for granted, in terms of regular delivery of natural system services—like fresh water or productive farmland—is available to us only because established climate patterns are consistent and allow ecosystems to thrive.

Climate breakdown means the loss of those everyday benefits, which in turn means pervasive economic disruption and fast-rising embedded costs. Already, rising food prices and embedded hidden costs are making life unaffordable for billions of people. In the United States, 75% of people report life in their own communities no longer being affordable. This has been confirmed to be true, in statistical terms, and the problem is worse in rural areas. Rural economic development needs a human-centered, sustainability-focused reimagining, in most of the world.

These experiences of embedded costs contributing to worsening unaffordability line up with the warnings issued by major U.S. financial regulators—first the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, during Donald Trump’s first term, and then the Financial Stability Oversight Council, whose findings were published 8 months into Joe Biden’s presidency. Both the CFTC and the FSOC reports found that unchecked climate disruption would cause ripple effects so pervasive and costly the financial system would cease to function and would no longer be able to support the everyday economy.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was agreed in Rio in 1992 and called on State Parties to collectively reduce global heating pollution to below 1990 levels by the year 2000. To date, the only years in which global GHG pollution declined were 2009, after the 2008 financial crisis, and 2020, due to the worldwide economic shutdowns spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Paris Agreement is an agreed approach to implementation of the Convention mandate to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” 11 years later, there has been important progress, but most clean energy deployment has been additional, not replacement, and planned energy investments would vastly expand overall global heating pollution.

At roughly 1.4ºC of global heating, we are already seeing that this strategy is not working. Polluting practices are making everything human beings wish to achieve more expensive, and that includes basic human develpoment and efforts to prevent armed conflict. Mid-20th-century strategies for managing inflation are not ideally suited to the climate-related embedded cost crisis. Those costs will keep rising, unless the necessary actions are taken to steer away from climate-disrupting polluting practices.

• The COP26 in Glasgow aimed to mobilize more than $130 trillion through major financial institutions, to remove all excuses for continuing to slow-walk climate solutions.
• The COP30 in Belém, last year, aimed to deliver unprecedented sums to investable conservation of vital ecosystems, especially the Amazon.
• The COP31 cannot allow the promise made year after year, that we will now shift to implementation, to go undelivered.

The COP is the State Parties to the Convention, 195 nations plus the European Union as an additional Party, alongside its own member states. Together, this global community of nations have the ability to restructure Climate Convention negotiations to unlock capital and spur investment in climate-resilient development.

How that happens—and whether it unlocks new flows of climate-smart finance as soon as 2027—will be the crucial decision.

In 2021, the United Nations Food Systems Summit identified roughly $350 billion in needed investment, per year, to transform food systems to ensure they stop destroying the environment, undermining climate security, and causing devastating ripple effects that take tens of millions of lives per year. The Food System Economics Commission would later find the world spends, wastes, or loses $15.428 trillion per year to unsustainable food system practices and their ripple effects.

In 2022, the Good Food Finance Network began to design a new kind of Co-Investment Platform for Food Systems Transformation. The Co-Investment Platform (CIP) idea recognizes the value of multilevel action and investment—to drive innovation, right-scale data and evidence, spread best practices, and deliver financing where it is most needed, to fill in gaps in value chains and support incubation of high-value scalable business strategies, based on climate-resilient food production practices.

We offer these structural innovations here as examples of what is possible, if nations shift from discussing their future commitments to actively coordinating investments for climate-resilient transformation of everyday practices. The better future people naturally seek and consistently call for is achievable, if industry is held to the standard lived by people in their communities—not to harm their neighbors, not to destroy what they have not created, not to behave recklessly or put others at risk.

Tens of millions of lives, tens of trillions of dollars, and prospects for international peace and security, are all at stake, if we fail to stop Nature loss and secure sustainable food systems aligned with climate resilience and human health. The commitment at the heart of the COP process, to protect the integrity of all ecosystems, means opportunities for investment to protect Nature, reduce climate risk, and catalyze integral human development, are waiting to be set in motion.

Co-investments, multilateral cooperative approaches to decarbonization, risk reduction, and resilience, and economy-building technology-sharing, trade, and finance, are part of that story of active implementation. To support high-ambition thinking and accelerated implementation, the 2026 Reinventing Prosperity report outlines four scenarios for high-value transformation:

1. A coastal city that realigns existing budget allocations, to dedicate more funding to education, pollution reduction, and healthcare, while investing to green the city, attracting new investment, job creation, and development.
2. A farming community that set up a multigenerational Farmland Innovation Task Force, focused on diversifying the rural economy, securing co-investments to support wider development needs, including roads and bridges, warehouses and new home building.
3. A small mountain town that used robust civic engagement to co-design and structure an incentive program to allow homes and businesses to invest in better practices, while reducing public debt and driving sustainable development.
4. A watershed partnership including headwaters county and municipal leadership and coastal communities that makes clean water more affordable and investable, charters a public development bank, and steers co-investments to support non-polluting practices.

Polluting practices are a trap. They can drive development, but they also embed preventable costs throughout the economy. Escaping the pollution trap requires cooperative innovation and intentional system-upgrading, to ensure new investments deliver benefits without destructive side effects.

Earth Civics calls on negotiators to:

• Consider cooperative approaches to accelerating innovation and mobilizing fast-paced climate action.
• Design co-investment mechanisms that allow mainstream capital to deliver climate benefits sooner rather than later.
• Support subnational governments in efforts to realign existing budget items to activate sustainable development opportunities rooted in decarbonization, adaptation, and resilience measures.
• Identify and act on constructive connections between sustainable practices and benefits to human health, opportunity, and wellbeing.
• Focus on farm communities as points of convergence for Nature, human development, clean air and water, finance, and mainstream economic outcomes.
• Commit to accelerated pathways for elimination of polluting energy, to better design and secure future opportunity.

Any nation or region can improve overall sustainable development, quality of life, and enduring peace and prosperity, by diversifying rural communities, making healthy, natural food the affordable mainstream norm for all, and grading public and private-sector investments on their real-world delivery of climate resilience benefits. COP31 is a chance to begin delivering on decades of big promises; doing so will give everyone a better chance at a future of sustainable wellbeing.