year like 2025 rarely hands us a single turning point. It hands us a pattern.
Across four different venues—Cape Town, Sevilla, Belém, and Brussels—leaders and institutions kept returning to one underlying idea: The challenges people feel most directly (jobs, prices, disasters, water, health, security) are connected. Financing that treats them as separate silos will always feel too slow, too small, or too costly.
Four signposts
In Cape Town, the Finance in Common Summit articulated the experiential learning of public development banks: Cooperation is not only about co–financing. It is about acting “as a coherent system” with “seamless inter–operability” across institutions and with the wider financial system. Practically, when standards, data, and processes travel with capital, money moves faster into quality projects and draws in partners instead of creating friction.
In Sevilla, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development provided a whole–of–finance map for that intuition. It recognized the cost of capital cannot be lowered if debt architecture is ignored; private investment cannot scale if rules and reporting are fragmented; tax capacity matters for resilience; trade rules matter for industrialization; and the financing system cannot learn without better data. The Sevilla Commitment provides a comprehensive framework for a modern financing ecosystem, including a follow–up process with in–depth reviews on a regular cycle.
The “make it workable” spirit is infusing climate diplomacy. The Belém Package and the “global mutirão” decision promote initiatives aimed at implementation and ambition, while the Baku Adaptation Roadmap sets up work for 2026–2028, including a just transition mechanism that puts people and equity at the center of the transition.
Brussels added nature and finance. In July, the European Commission launched its Roadmap Toward Nature Credits, framing nature as something that belongs on the balance sheet. Descriptively, nature credits are meant to reward verified nature–positive actions—restoring wetlands, expanding forests, improving ecosystems—so those who steward land and seas can see tangible value and investors can back credible outcomes. The roadmap also places emphasis on standards and certification to build trust and reduce greenwashing.
Together, 2025's milestones point to convergence: a financing system that is more interoperable, more focused on implementation, and more explicit about nature and resilience as economic foundations. In 2026, implementation capability will require translating this pattern into routines that planners, finance ministries, banks, regulators, and communities can use.
Three bridges
This is where systems thinking stops sounding abstract and starts sounding like common sense. By organizing finance into integrated portfolios rather than isolated projects, the Development Bank for Resilient Prosperity—the "Nature Bank"—addresses systemic bottlenecks and mobilizes diversified capital. When finance is organized this way, interoperability becomes the way for institutions to build a lower–risk, resilience–oriented investment strategy.
A "planetary balance sheet" framing helps as a second bridge. It takes the EU's simple phrase—put nature on the balance sheet—and connects it to tools that already exist. Environmental–economic accounting frameworks backed by the UN, and comprehensive wealth accounts tracked by institutions such as the World Bank, are increasingly able to complement GDP by tracking the stocks we rely on: produced capital, human capital, and natural capital.
The third bridge is appraisal. Traditional benefit–cost analysis often fails to capture systemic risk reduction or the benefits of nature–based, resilient infrastructure. Yet, nature–based solutions deliver multiple benefits over time and narrow benefit definitions can disadvantage communities and undervalue resilience. A simple example is a restored mangrove: It can reduce storm damage, support fisheries, and strengthen local livelihoods. Broadening appraisal to reflect systems risk and systems return does not change the physics of floods or heat; it changes how decision–makers value investments that prevent loss before it arrives.
None of these bridges requires everyone to agree on one grand theory. They invite practical steps: shared definitions and interoperable data; pipelines that bundle related investments into portfolios; and evaluation tools that reflect how people actually experience risk and benefit.
If 2025 was the year the dots (four milestones) started to connect, 2026 can be the year the connectors are built and a test produced.
One test
- For political leaders: Can interoperability and better appraisal make it easier to fund priorities that citizens most directly feel—safer coasts, reliable water, healthier cities—while keeping an eye on debt and fiscal space?
- For technical advisors: Can more value come from making existing frameworks talk better to each other—taxonomies, data platforms, standards for outcomes, and project portfolios that are resilient, inclusive, and ready for finance?
- For the general public: Can nature on the balance sheet advance prosperity—protecting and regenerating living systems and stabilizing livelihoods?
Responding yes to all attests to an evolving transformation in the development narrative.
a global affairs media network
Can we finance prosperity as a system?
Photo by Mario Verduzco via Unsplash.
February 5, 2026
2025 shows prosperity can’t be financed in silos, and it calls for interoperable systems that link finance, nature, resilience, and people, writes Gene Leon and Ashaki Goodwin.
A
year like 2025 rarely hands us a single turning point. It hands us a pattern.
Across four different venues—Cape Town, Sevilla, Belém, and Brussels—leaders and institutions kept returning to one underlying idea: The challenges people feel most directly (jobs, prices, disasters, water, health, security) are connected. Financing that treats them as separate silos will always feel too slow, too small, or too costly.
Four signposts
In Cape Town, the Finance in Common Summit articulated the experiential learning of public development banks: Cooperation is not only about co–financing. It is about acting “as a coherent system” with “seamless inter–operability” across institutions and with the wider financial system. Practically, when standards, data, and processes travel with capital, money moves faster into quality projects and draws in partners instead of creating friction.
In Sevilla, the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development provided a whole–of–finance map for that intuition. It recognized the cost of capital cannot be lowered if debt architecture is ignored; private investment cannot scale if rules and reporting are fragmented; tax capacity matters for resilience; trade rules matter for industrialization; and the financing system cannot learn without better data. The Sevilla Commitment provides a comprehensive framework for a modern financing ecosystem, including a follow–up process with in–depth reviews on a regular cycle.
The “make it workable” spirit is infusing climate diplomacy. The Belém Package and the “global mutirão” decision promote initiatives aimed at implementation and ambition, while the Baku Adaptation Roadmap sets up work for 2026–2028, including a just transition mechanism that puts people and equity at the center of the transition.
Brussels added nature and finance. In July, the European Commission launched its Roadmap Toward Nature Credits, framing nature as something that belongs on the balance sheet. Descriptively, nature credits are meant to reward verified nature–positive actions—restoring wetlands, expanding forests, improving ecosystems—so those who steward land and seas can see tangible value and investors can back credible outcomes. The roadmap also places emphasis on standards and certification to build trust and reduce greenwashing.
Together, 2025's milestones point to convergence: a financing system that is more interoperable, more focused on implementation, and more explicit about nature and resilience as economic foundations. In 2026, implementation capability will require translating this pattern into routines that planners, finance ministries, banks, regulators, and communities can use.
Three bridges
This is where systems thinking stops sounding abstract and starts sounding like common sense. By organizing finance into integrated portfolios rather than isolated projects, the Development Bank for Resilient Prosperity—the "Nature Bank"—addresses systemic bottlenecks and mobilizes diversified capital. When finance is organized this way, interoperability becomes the way for institutions to build a lower–risk, resilience–oriented investment strategy.
A "planetary balance sheet" framing helps as a second bridge. It takes the EU's simple phrase—put nature on the balance sheet—and connects it to tools that already exist. Environmental–economic accounting frameworks backed by the UN, and comprehensive wealth accounts tracked by institutions such as the World Bank, are increasingly able to complement GDP by tracking the stocks we rely on: produced capital, human capital, and natural capital.
The third bridge is appraisal. Traditional benefit–cost analysis often fails to capture systemic risk reduction or the benefits of nature–based, resilient infrastructure. Yet, nature–based solutions deliver multiple benefits over time and narrow benefit definitions can disadvantage communities and undervalue resilience. A simple example is a restored mangrove: It can reduce storm damage, support fisheries, and strengthen local livelihoods. Broadening appraisal to reflect systems risk and systems return does not change the physics of floods or heat; it changes how decision–makers value investments that prevent loss before it arrives.
None of these bridges requires everyone to agree on one grand theory. They invite practical steps: shared definitions and interoperable data; pipelines that bundle related investments into portfolios; and evaluation tools that reflect how people actually experience risk and benefit.
If 2025 was the year the dots (four milestones) started to connect, 2026 can be the year the connectors are built and a test produced.
One test
- For political leaders: Can interoperability and better appraisal make it easier to fund priorities that citizens most directly feel—safer coasts, reliable water, healthier cities—while keeping an eye on debt and fiscal space?
- For technical advisors: Can more value come from making existing frameworks talk better to each other—taxonomies, data platforms, standards for outcomes, and project portfolios that are resilient, inclusive, and ready for finance?
- For the general public: Can nature on the balance sheet advance prosperity—protecting and regenerating living systems and stabilizing livelihoods?
Responding yes to all attests to an evolving transformation in the development narrative.
