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By Missy S. Mastel
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Fifty-six men signed the Declaration of Independence, and many had good reason to doubt one another. They came from colonies that quarreled over borders, trade and slavery. Yet the document ends not with a plea for trust but with a promise: "...we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."
A pledge isn't a feeling. It's a structure. Each signer's survival now depended on everyone else's. I think about that sentence often, because I've spent 25 years watching what happens when money moves without one.
Therefore, we should stop waiting for it and build pledges instead. We need financial structures where every party gains only if the others do. Trust follows. It doesn't lead.
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Now, consider how endurance, another key element in this way of thinking, actually works. I use this next example with no interest in its politics. In April 2025, Senator Cory Booker spoke on the Senate floor for more than 25 hours, the longest speech in the chamber's history. He broke a 1957 record held by Strom Thurmond, who had spoken against the Civil Rights Act.
Set aside what you think of either cause and look at the mechanics. Booker did not do it alone. Dozens of colleagues joined in, some giving him breaks by asking questions, and one said he was returning a favor from nine years earlier. Even the longest solo speech in history was a team sport.
Climate money has a table too, and many of the people who need it are not able to access it. Developing countries receive roughly $26 billion a year in international public adaptation finance. The UN Environment Programme via The Quint estimates the annual gap by 2035 at between $284 billion and $339 billion.
Pledges Need to be Turned Into Results
On November 9, delegates gather in Antalya, Türkiye, for COP31. Talks in Bonn this June stalled on how to deliver the pledge to at least triple adaptation finance for developing countries by 2035, and the item passed to COP31 in Antalya unresolved, according to the Carbon Brief. We have been good at pledging. We have been far less good at building the structure that makes a pledge hold.
The money is not missing. Cerulli Associates projects that roughly $124 trillion will pass from older Americans to heirs and charity through 2048: about $105 trillion to heirs and $18 trillion to charity.
That is roughly six dollars to heirs for every one to charity. Heirs already inherit around $2.5 trillion a year, says the report, as presented by CNBC. For scale, the entire annual adaptation gap is roughly one-seventh to one-ninth of a single year's inheritances.
I don't think inherited wealth is villainy. I think it is architecture. Wealth that can stand alone teaches the next generation that they can too, and a person who never needs anyone rarely pledges anything to anyone. That is the wall between the haves and the have-nots, and it gets built one dinner table at a time.
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So let's start at the dinner table. I've been encouraging leaders to sit down with their own children and ask a different question than "what will you inherit?" Ask instead what is important enough for us to pledge together that none of us could do alone.
A similar principle applies within companies. Sustainability is often approached as a matter of compliance, reputation management or risk reduction. Yet the organisations working directly with vulnerable communities can struggle to secure the long-term funding needed to deliver meaningful results. Closer collaboration between businesses and nonprofits could help address this imbalance.
Put those nonprofits inside the supply chain instead, with a seat in the company's finance and risk conversations and oversight of the adaptation projects they help build. It would also allow companies to draw on their expertise when assessing the social and environmental impact of their operations.
Rather than treating sustainability as a separate corporate responsibility exercise, businesses could make it part of how they operate, with clearer accountability for both sides. This is another way of putting the declaration's underlying principle into practice: shared responsibility creates a stronger foundation for lasting commitments.
Outrage: Cheap to Produce and Expensive to Live Inside
We can have a future where the flood siren is funded before the river rises. Companies and nonprofits report results together, adaptation money reaches the communities that need it, and the largest transfer of wealth in history carries obligations as well as balances.
Or we can continue down a path where pledges keep outrunning delivery. The next flood finds the money sitting in an account, giving thins toward the single digits I fear, and our children inherit large fortunes and a faith that wealth will protect them. I don't think it will. No fortune sits high enough above a rising river.
Outrage is cheap to produce and expensive to live inside. I read the reports. I'm an accountant, and we all need to know where we are. But a report that merely justifies our outrage leaves us angrier and no better equipped, and anger doesn't build a flood siren.
I would rather justify the hope. Pledge in public, agree on outcomes up front, and publish what each dollar did as a percentage of what's needed. Hope that can be audited is not naïve. It is the only kind that survives a bad news cycle.
Here is where to start. Leaders, ask your own children what is important enough to pledge together. Executives, pick one supply chain category and put a nonprofit partner in your finance and risk conversations by year-end. Negotiators and funders require at least two sectors at every table, agree on outcomes up front, and publish results as a share of what's needed.
The founders gave us the template 250 years ago this past July. The question for the next 250 years is who else gets to sign. Let's start by inviting them.
Missy S. Mastel is the founder of Climate Impact Innovations and a sustainability futurist. The views expressed are the author's own.
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