Climate Civics is founded on the principle that all of us have a right to shape the world we live in. The climate challenge only reinforces this basic human right, and makes it more useful and necessary that we hear from anyone with local insights and good ideas about how to reduce risk and build resilience.

Everyone is a climate stakeholder. In fact, all living things are climate stakeholders.

How do we build civic spaces—or upgrade existing ones—to activate the best of human potential, for the benefit of all?

First, we believe constructive civic engagement should be founded on six core principles:

1. We are all future-builders.
2. Health is a fabric of wellbeing and value.
3. Resilience is a baseline imperative.
4. Leave no one behind.
5. Design to transcend crisis.
6. Maximize integrative value creation.

These three principles of fact and three principles of action comprise the Principles for Reinventing Prosperity, which emerged from a process of stakeholder engagement, as nations around the world faced the unprecedented crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020. The pandemic was killing large numbers of people, shutting down whole economies, and disrupting international supply chains, creating additional dangers from scarcity and economic ripple effects.

What emerged from discussions between people living in diverse communities—from large cities to remote country villages, in wealthy industrialized countries and large and small developing countries, in coastal and mountain landscapes—was that resilience is a shared project, and the work of addressing climate change, pandemics, or other transnational crises, must involve constructive, ongoing civic engagement in local communities.

The 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report emphasizes Transcending Crisis as an organizing priority. It calls for civic renewal that includes 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.

The Climate Civics strategy for constructive climate-related civic process and empowerment gathers all of this into that foundational insight: We are all climate stakeholders.

That means:

1. Local civic spaces should be open to experts and non-experts, office-holders and citizens, and to the most vulnerable.
2. Supporting reduced risk for the most vulnerable generally means improving at the systemic level, which brings automatic, cost-effective benefits to all of society.
3. Infrastructure, policy, investment, and financial and trade arrangements need to be vulnerability-sensitive, with active consideration of local impacts and effects.
4. Nothing makes more sense than to ask people who must live with and implement a plan how they would do so.
5. Nations can build stronger national policies by starting with actionable local priorities, then reinforcing effective policy with systemic improvements.

Our flagship program is the Climate Value Exchange—a cooperative innovation platform supporting events, insight-sharing, education and empowerment workshops, policy briefs and dispatches from international negotiations, the Reinventing Prosperity reports, and coalition efforts to address food security and finance, climate cooperation, and constructive civic engagement.