Global Systems Are Shifting. Lessons from 2025 and the Road Ahead

Blog by Sergio Fernandez de Cordova, Executive Chairman, PVBLIC Foundation

What a Year of Transition Revealed About a World in Motion

Most people can feel it.

On the surface, systems that once felt stable now feel strained. Global challenges are stacking faster than solutions, and institutions meant to coordinate action are moving more slowly than the world they are meant to serve.

Yet when looking more closely, what is less visible is that the foundations of new systems are already taking shape beneath the surface. This is where the real work is happening.

This reflection looks back at PVBLIC’s work in 2025 and signals the direction ahead for 2026. It is written for a broad audience because the changes beneath the surface that are underway will shape economies, open new development pathways, and create opportunities far beyond policy circles or institutional settings.

PVBLIC’s work, at its core, is to help countries, institutions, and partners collaborate across borders to address challenges no single actor can solve alone. That work sits at the intersection of nature, technology, capital, and global cooperation.

2025 was not a year of commentary. It was a year of construction.

Across global engagements, the focus shifted decisively from fragmented initiatives to integrated platforms. From conversation to execution. From ideas to infrastructure. The world does not lack knowledge about solutions. What has been missing is the implementation of systems that work.

PVBLIC’s 2025 Evolved Focus 

For much of its fourteen-year history, PVBLIC has operated across data, technology, and media. Those pillars were essential during a period when awareness, access, and visibility were the primary constraints.

By the start of 2025, the constraint had changed.

The challenge was no longer telling the story, but rather developing the pathways through which engagement and execution could occur. It was about building what comes next, in a world where systems level thinking alone was not enough to create the change we need for society. The focus needed to be on system-level execution.  

This is why, in response, PVBLIC evolved its institutional framework around four pillars that build on the initial focus to better reflect how power, value, and resilience are now organized in the global system. Thus, our institutional pillars have evolved to:

1. Nature

2. Technology

3. Capital

4. Multilateralism

This was not a cosmetic change. It was a recognition that sustainable progress requires integrated systems, not isolated solutions.

The world does not need more dialogue alone. It needs systems that work, capital aligned for the long term, and partnerships built to endure.

The Four Pillars Explained in Plain Terms

1 - Nature: Valuing What Sustains Us

Nature has long been treated as an external concern, something to protect after economic decisions are made. That approach no longer works.

In 2025, PVBLIC advanced work that treats nature as infrastructure: forests, oceans, biodiversity, and ecosystems as assets that underpin food security, climate resilience, and economic stability. This shift forms the foundation of the Development Bank for Resilient Prosperity (DBRP): The Nature Bank , which in 2026 is being rebranded as the Nature Bank. This will provide greater alignment with its intended purpose as an institutional mechanism designed to recognize, structure, and activate Real World Natural Assets (RWNA) as Nature Capital.

In practical terms, this means enabling countries to protect and preserve natural systems while strengthening their economies, rather than choosing between the two. This is not simply a shift toward recognizing nature as an asset class, but a movement to create real program activation in support of the Beyond GDP global framework, which will be critical to nation-building in the coming decades. Through new RWNA frameworks and new institutions like the Nature Bank, Nature Capital we are positioning nature not as an externality, but as the future capital base underpinning global resilience, development, and prosperity.

2 - Technology: From Innovation to Institutional Capability

Technology shapes how societies function, how economies grow, and how countries protect their interests.

One of the persistent gaps in global innovation is not the absence of technology, but the inability of promising ventures to scale due to a lack of institutional adoption, procurement pathways, and trusted distribution. Too often, technology solutions exist, but the systems required to deploy them at sovereign and institutional scale do not.

Our focus has shifted from innovation alone to questions of sovereignty, resilience, and access. Technology, when deployed as infrastructure rather than product, becomes an enabler of system-level execution, allowing countries to leapfrog outdated economic, governance, and service-delivery models and move directly into modern infrastructure across data, geospatial systems, and emerging digital platforms.

Technology transfer, when done responsibly, allows countries not simply to acquire tools, but to build institutional capability and retain control over their own systems. With the launch of the Global Institute for Technology Development and Advancement (GITDA), working in concert with the Resilience, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Nature (REIN) platform and the AI Leapfrog Initiative (ALI), PVBLIC addresses this execution gap through an integrated architecture that combines opportunity creation, entrepreneur development, technology transfer, and sovereign-scale deployment.

In this model, technology is no longer just innovation at the edge. It is the operational foundation through which strategic capacity, data sovereignty, and long-term resilience are achieved.

3 - Capital: Rethinking How Progress Is Measured, Structured, and Funded

Traditional economic measures no longer reflect how value is created or sustained. Metrics such as GDP fail to capture resilience, data production, natural capital, or long-term systemic risk. As a result, many countries remain locked in financing models that reward short-term extraction while undermining long-term stability.

In 2025, the shift toward Beyond GDP frameworks accelerated from theory into practice. These approaches reframe how progress is measured and how capital is structured, enabling countries and institutions to finance economic development, resilience, and infrastructure without repeating legacy debt and dependency models.

At the same time, new development and financing models began to take shape across regional and thematic platforms. From Small Island and vulnerable state frameworks such as the ABAS, to institutional structuring and advisory work with partners including the Bretton Woods Committee, DLA Piper and RoseTree Group, the focus has been on aligning capital with real economic fundamentals rather than abstract indicators.

Capital, in this context, is no longer just financial input, but a new architecture to support global development.

4 - Multilateralism: Making Global Cooperation Work Again

Multilateralism is simply how countries and institutions work together across borders. When it works well, problems get solved. When it does not, the consequences are more severe than ever in a world shaped by accelerating technology.

PVBLIC’s work focuses on modernizing how multilateral cooperation functions, moving from slow, procedural processes to platform-based collaboration that includes governments, the private sector, and philanthropy working in alignment.

The goal is not to replace institutions, but to help them operate at the speed and scale the world now requires.

What 2026 Will Bring

As we move into 2026, several shifts are becoming unavoidable.

1. Nature will continue moving onto balance sheets and into economic decision-making.

2. Data will increasingly be treated as a sovereign asset.

3. New financing models will emerge to fund infrastructure and resilience.

4. Technology transfer will scale as a development strategy, not an exception.

5. Space-based systems will evolve into essential economic and data infrastructure.

6. Philanthropy will continue shifting from charity to long-term capital architecture.

Taken together, these shifts point to a world where value, power, and cooperation are being redefined.

Delivering What Comes Next

2026 will not reward those who wait. It will reward those who build.

For PVBLIC, the mandate is clear: design and deliver platforms that help countries, institutions, and partners work together in a rapidly changing world. The work ahead will require discipline, neutrality, and sustained collaboration.

Progress at this level is never individual. It is collective.

The work continues.

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- Sergio Fernandez de Cordova y de Veyga, Executive Chairman, PVBLIC Foundation