We live in a time of wicked problems, some at planetary scale, each entangled with the others in a thorny thicket of multidimensional polycrisis. In a Climate Civics brief for the Food Systems Summit +4 Stocktake in July, we outlined seven dimensions of polycrisis facing the community of nations in our time: 

1. Fiscal stability stresses, where public budgets are overstretched and under-resourced, worsening shock events. 
2. Climate disruption, nature loss and erosion of biodiversity and watersheds;
3. COVID-19 pandemic disruptions and after-effects, including inflation, income inequality, and financial instability; 
4. Conflict, including serious impacts on food security; 
5. Protectionist measures and related disruptions of trade and cooperation; 
6. Income inequality worsening as a result of each of these and further worsened by emerging generative AI technologies, which have not yet been set on a course to be devoted solely and above all to benefitting the human rights and conditions of all people, no matter how far outside the institutions that own them; 
7. The “thorny problem” dynamic, where sensible solutions turn into unwanted ripple effects. 

Each of these is a complicated tangle of interacting and compounding threats to human security and wellbeing. Together, they build up to something more intractable than a technical challenge: the polycrisis is an ongoing threat to the rights and liberties of people everywhere, as it is an engine that can push sudden shock events and ripple effects into complicated human systems, sometimes without warning. 

Civics is not just the established process of local decision-making, or the classroom story about Constitutional law and democratic governance. Those things are an important part of the wider landscape of civic engagement, but they are far from the whole story.

The civic space is the shared space for decision-making about problems large and small. 

• The civic space might be ruled by hardline ideologies, disinformation, or authoritarian regimes, but it remains a space where people’s lives are being shaped, often by too narrow a group of minds and interests and too limited a body of evidence. In those cases, it is also a space where every human being can sense what is missing—that deeper, active commitment to the humanity and worth of each human being in society.
• So, the civic space should be something much more vibrant. It should be an open forum in which all citizens and stakeholders have legally defensible rights, including the right to have a voice, and where public servants are just that—servants of everyone else in society, regardless of their specific affiliations, origins, beliefs, or conditions.

We must not confuse civic renewal with the also laudable, but more limited goal of civility. It is not always necessary for people with competing ideas to be cordial to each other, or welcoming of one another’s perspective, for the process they partake in to be a constructive civic process. What is needed is for those who inject menace, corruption, and dehumanization into discussion to be marginalized, so that more constructive voices can rise. It is irrational—from the standpoint of foundational purpose—to allow the possibility of civics that solves problems to be annulled by people whose main interest is self-promotion or degradation of the rights and priority of others. 

For example, the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States describes the nation’s founding purpose as follows:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The law is not established by an elite, so its members can rule over everyone else; it is established by the people, so all who wield power must do so in service of the humanity of everyone else. The purpose of union is not perfection, but progress toward a better way of working and living, and thriving together. Justice is not an ideal; it is a core purpose. Injustice should be countered, as a matter of collective and reciprocal obligation. 

The nation is also committed to internal peace and tranquility. This means a number of things, by definition: It means each must tolerate the other, and no group can be given sole power to rule over all. It means justice must be accessible, and real, and practiced, and credible. It means civics must be a way of working out problems, not projecting prejudice or harm onto one’s fellow human beings. The nation is committed to the defense of its people and to their “general Welfare”. Suffering and deprivation should be common challenges we are committed to overcoming, for the benefit of all. 

And of course, the nation is committed to not only ensuring people remain free, but that they can enjoy “the Blessings of Liberty”, now and across future generations. We are mutually committed to supporting each other’s rights and freedoms.

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The Preamble of the United Nations Charter echoes much of this: 

We the Peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.

As the Norwegian Nobel Committee writes in its announcement of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, “the tools of democracy are also the tools of peace.” 

Civic renewal is not about two sides of a hyper-partisan divide suddenly discovering the value of being civil to each other. Many of those who now hold the floor will be forgotten as a healthier society leverages what is good in its people and in their collective commitment to democracy. Civic renewal is a process through which all people—including those left out of the equations that determine power and privilege—are valued as part of the living fabric of our societies, and of life on our planet. 

In a 2017 essay about what science can teach us about civics, I wrote: 

If my worldview is not open to the possibility that you exist, and have thoughts, and study the nature of things, and might discover truth I was not aware of, then my worldview is structured to be self-defeating. If we are not invested in smart, ongoing discovery, then we are invested in our own eventual degradation and decline.

Civic renewal must include several elements of practice and effect: 

• Places where people of conscience can gather and work together on common problems, without fear of partisan interference or political coercion;
• Engagement strategies that allow for sharing of diverse ideas but filter out vitriol and animus, so people can hear each other;
• Tools that allow vulnerable communities and other stakeholders to shape imaginative, responsible decisions in high-level spaces, for the benefit of all;
• Systems that value non-financial and non-ideological data and subjective inputs, which can inform decision-makers across the mainstream.

Those spaces for cooperative problem solving, strategies for attracting diverse, constructive inputs, levers that allow vulnerable communities and others affected by high-level decisions to shape those decisions to eliminate preventable harm, and qualitative information about the real-world value of specific choices, can combine in countless ways to secure a better future. 

Reading the seven dimensions of polycrisis, it is clear that specific impacts are not named. Food systems might collapse, due to any or all of the seven dimensions in combination. Many areas of human experience cut across these sweeping challenges. All of the small actions and local efforts that are needed to transform food systems into sustainable ongoing contributions to the resilience of human and planetary health tie into the seven dimensions in some way, and rely on the availability of constructive, vibrant, open civics, which is needed to allow better information to flow and empowered co-development to become mainstream.

In the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report on designing to transcend crisis, we will put forward areas of action under each of the four named elements of civic renewal, and connect them to Preambular commitments, facets of polycrisis, or the Sustainable Development Goals, so that readers can get started activating such options in their surroundings.

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Read more about the Principles for Reinventing Prosperity, and the annual and interim reports, at ClimateValue.net