Finance for Resilience of People and Planet. Reflecting on 50 years after the Stockholm Conference in 1972

Fifty years might not seem long in the history of planet Earth, but the last 50 years have had profound implications for the climate system, natural systems and all life on Earth. The year 2022 marks the 50th Anniversaries of the historic 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and the beginning of multilateral collaboration on environmental and sustainability challenges. Financial pledges to support developing countries in their efforts to achieve climate and sustainability ambitions, and the importance of economic indicators have always been at the center of international sustainability debates. This anniversary invites us all to reflect on the successes and failures of multilateral attempts to define economic and sustainability indicators, and the ambitions to accelerate funding flows in ways that support a transition towards sustainability. This article reflects on these ambitions, and concludes that the world has made limited progress on these issues in the last decades. The gap between funding needs and actual allocation is widening, and worsened recently due to the economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war on Ukraine. Wealthy countries have still do fulfill their promises to mobilize US$100 billion per year to support developing countries, at the same time as estimates show that the impacts of climate change could cost developing countries between $290 to $580 billion in 2030, and exceed $1 trillion by 2050. We propose a number of principles that will be needed both in the near (next 25 years) and long term (beyond 2050) to build resilience of both vulnerable groups and communities, as well as of important ecosystems, biomes and the climate system. These principles are based on the latest insights about the features of transformations include: a) defining a new direction, b) creating enabling conditions, c) support phasing out of damaging activities, d) drive accelerated investor action for resilience, e) act with urgency and speed.