There is a reason all moral and religious traditions treat lying as an offense, even a sin which warrants divine punishment. Providing people with false information has real impacts on their ability to navigate the world. Falsehoods can break trust, ruin relationships, mislead people about sources of danger, and cause decisions that lead to preventable harm. Legitimate public authorities must not lie to their people or accept disinformation as the everyday norm.

Since the advent of modern science, the rights to ask questions, to seek knowledge, to verify and share facts and evidence, to conduct scientific inquiry, and to pursue legal redress for injustice, have come to define our understanding of legitimate public authorities. Governments that advance science and protect freedom of information are better able to support good outcomes for the people who live in their countries.

In 2025, we saw an unprecedented push by key governments to divert funding away from needed science endeavors, including in areas of research supporting human health, public health policy, environmental impacts, and climate risk. Some of that disruption has been corrected in recent legislation in the United States, but funding is still declining.

At the COP30 climate negotiations in Brazil, a group of nations joined a new Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change: 

The document calls on governments, the private sector, civil society, academia, and donors to take concrete measures to address the growing impact of misinformation, false information, denialism, and deliberate attacks against environmental journalists, advocates, scientists, and researchers – actions that undermine climate efforts and jeopardize societal stability.

The signals of planetary health are showing rapidly worsening, pervasive risk. The 2025 State of the Climate Report found:

• “Of the 34 planetary vital signs we continue to track (figures 1 and 2), 22 are at record levels (supplemental table S1), and many show alarming trends…”
• “humanity is in a state of ecological overshoot—a state in which resources are consumed faster than they can be replenished…”
• “Global tree cover loss was 29.6 megahectares (Mha) in 2024, the second highest area on record and a 4.7% increase relative to 2023 (figure 1f). This was partly due to fire-related global tree cover loss reaching a record high…”
• Fire-related losses are attributable to worsening climate change and related disruptions in preciptation patterns, watersheds, and the health of ecosystems.
• “In 2025, on the basis of year-to-date averages, Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice mass levels were at record lows…”
• “ocean heat content reached a record high [which] likely contributed to the ongoing coral bleaching event, affecting roughly 84% of the world’s coral reef area between 1 January 2023 and 31 May 2025, making it the most extensive bleaching incident in recorded history (NOAA Coral Reef Watch 2025).”

The costs of worsening climate disruption are almost impossible to understand in conventional economic, financial, and political terms. Some quick points to help highlight the looming crisis:

• The Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have found that unchecked climate change will destabilize the financial system and the wider US and global economies.
• The Food System Economics Commission (FSEC) finds we are burning through $15.4 trillion per year in senseless waste and cost from unsustainable practices.
• The International Monetary Fund (IMF) finds we are spending more than $7 trillion per year to prop up fossil fuel production and consumption, generating these preventable hidden costs.
• Unchecked climate change will lead to 3 to 6 billion people, globally, being “confined beyond the livable region”, according to the 2023 State of the Climate report.

Fiscal stability of nation states is at risk, and so their economic and national security. Millions of lives per year are lost to pollution linked to these polluting activities. The right to know is not an abstract concept; it is a practical need directly related to the imperatives of protecting human life and national security.

The investment boom supporting artificial intelligence-related enterprise provides an incentive to develop systems that spread false or misleading information. The threat to information integrity is obvious, and multiple summits of world leaders have taken place, in an effort to safeguard the right to access and to know facts and evidence.

AI-driven disinformation has the potential to corrupt scientific inquiry, disable intelligence gathering that defends democracies, and provide cover for vast criminal networks. An international standard for information integrity is needed, and it must provide both guidance and structural constraints that prevent AI systems from flooding personal, business, and academic information systems with “slop” or with intentional disinformation.

Activities that invest in and profit from improving access to information about planetary health and human wellbeing need to be brought into the mainstream of everyday economic activity. This means, in part, support through public policy, subsidies, targeted tax credits, and the investment community.

Since 2016, we have called for improved insight into the macrocritical resilience value of mainstream investments across the public and private sectors. Macrocritical value generation shapes the wider economy, so that better outcomes are more likely in general, leveling up the whole playing field, and vastly expanding the potential for future returns by improving lives and livelihoods and reducing catastrophic costs from ill health, climate impacts, and other hidden costs.

It will eventually be impossible for banks and insurers, institutional investors, and asset managers, to make sound decisions about future financial value, without considering the non-financial sources of value that make a healthy economy possible. Already, insurers are refusing to provide certain kinds of coverage in regions that face high probability of repeated severe climate impacts. 

Mainstream banking, insurance, and businesses large and small, need tools that can help them invest in resilience-building practices and service providers. 

It is possible to treat the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the nations of the UN General Assembly in September 2015, as a map of the practical landscape of opportunities for multidimensional value creation. One of the under-attended areas of both need and major investment potential is in local economies.

To maximize that opportunity, education is a core imperative: The primary effect of under-education is income inequality, which is among the most corrosive and destabilizing socio-economic forces.

• When wealthy, advanced economies with open democracy see income inequality spike, they also tend to see rule of law break down, corruption spread, and pseudo-populist demagogues move into the mainstream, putting all of their achievements at risk.
• Societies with less widespread affluence and a lower degree of established democratic process still see erosion of wellbeing and opportunity for the average person, and more widespread seeds of instability.

The first SDGs are eliminating poverty and hunger, spreading good health and education, and supporting real progress on gender equality, because doing these things neutralizes corrosive forces and provides a more stable foundation for promoting “better standards of life in larger freedom”, as the UN Charter demands. Because the Goals are adaptable to local circumstance and can be pursued by public authorities or by charities, businesses, and communities, they open the possibility of a world where information is factual, open to everyone, and adapted to local needs and priorites.

In the 2025 Reinventing Prosperity report, we identified a need for civic renewal, which must play out across multiple levels of jurisdiction. Local communities, regional economies, national governments, and international negotiations around trade, climate, financial regulation, countering organized crime, and AI safety, all need to see more public participation, more deference to marginal voices, to build more locally rooted insight into consequential decisions.

We are moving into a new period in history, where teleconnections (connections between people and places that are far apart) are more important than ever before. Human rights are the foundation of relations between countries. Governments that honor the rights of their people are more skilled at ensuring national decisions are beneficial at the human scale; this has ripple effects across borders, and creates foundations for good-faith negotiation, transparent decision-making, and long-term trust.

Time-tested thinking is both a necessary ingredient in the sustainable future and a potential hindrance to progress.

• Conventional wisdom, when it gives outsize weight to outdated or destructive practices, can be a costly prejudice that infuses cost throughout the economy and undermines resilient value-creation for everyone.
• At the same time, we must not leave behind the lessons of history. The further we get in time from the Second World War, the easier it is for political leaders to claim and the general public to believe that cooperative investment in human development is not needed.
• It is needed, and the risks of failing to support success include costs to everyone on an inconceivable scale.

We will all experience more security and opportunity, better living conditions, and reduced risk from serious threats to health and safety, if we build an economy oriented toward local and planetary health and resilience. Doing that will require new flows of high-resolution Earth system data and insights into non-financial value creation.