THE SOLUTION FOR A WORLD ON FIRE
“Make no mistake: This is our new normal. We are the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change & the last generation with a shot at doing anything about it.”
– Kathy Hochul, Governor of New York, July 10, 2023
PHOENIX
World Transformation Platform™
THE SOLUTION FOR A WORLD ON FIRE
“Make no mistake: This is our new normal. We are the first generation to feel the impacts of climate change & the last generation with a shot at doing anything about it.” – Kathy Hochul, Governor of New York, July 10, 2023 .
In August 2021, following a nine-hour search, Jonathan Gerrish and Ellen Chung, their baby and their dog were found dead on a hiking trail minutes from their home in Mariposa, California. They had not been in an accident. They were not attacked by a bear or mountain lion. It was not murder or suicide. They were young, happy and in good health.
After two months of examination and deliberation, the local coroner announced the cause. It was heat. It had been 109º on the ground the day of that short hike. The family had ample water but little shade. And the human body, no matter how smart or fit, can only take so much heat.
As Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First, writes, “As the heat rises [above 107º], the proteins unfold and the bonds that keep the structures together break…At the most fundamental level, your body unravels. … Your insides melt and disintegrate — you are hemorrhaging everywhere.”
In the summer of 2023, just two years later, 80 million Americans live in towns and cities where the temperature rose above 105º. Often for days or even weeks at a time.
We are all increasingly at risk of becoming that young family from Mariposa, taking a healthy walk on a beautiful day close to home, somehow completely unaware of what we are doing to ourselves and our children.
Climate Crisis at Scale: Humans, like the proverbial frog in a pot of cold water placed on a stove, seem to have had no recognition of just how vulnerable we are. The heat was rising but we didn’t seem to feel it. And we absolutely didn’t believe it could hurt us. Then suddenly, it was all we could see, feel or talk about. And for good reason.
Phoenix, Arizona recorded a record 26 consecutive days with temperatures above 110º F. Miami, Florida, hit a record of 44 days with a heat index above 100º F. El Paso, Texas, set a new record for consecutive days with triple-digit heat, at 40 days and counting.
Europe experienced its own heatwave with Rome, Italy, and Figueres, Spain, reaching their highest ever recorded temperatures of 109º F and 113º F respectively, just two years after a record heat wave caused over 61,000 deaths, principally among the young and the elderly.
In China, Sanbao logged a record-breaking 126º F and Beijing endured four weeks of temperatures above 95º F. In Iran, the Persian Gulf International Airport recorded a heat index of 152º F.
That was all in one single summer. And the challenges are only beginning. According to NASA and EU Copernicus, the year of 2023 was the world’s hottest on record.
INTERRELATED CRISES CAUSED BY CHANGES IN CLIMATE
The World Bank estimates that unchecked climate change will drag upwards of 130 million people into poverty before the decade is out and force an additional 200 million people to migrate by 2050. Massive job loss and the requirement of up-skilling the labor force will destabilize economic systems around the world due to unpreparedness. This situation would lead to monetary impacts that will make it even more difficult to help these at-risk populations cope.
There are vast differences between nations’ capacities to meet increasing climate crisis challenges. Industrialized nations have far greater ability to adapt to shifts in the ecosystem than less industrialized nations; and within these nations, the most vulnerable, approximately one billion children, according to UNICEF, are now at severe climate risk.
Already historic refugee flows are expected to rise further. These movements, together with an increasing strain on fundamental resources and human infrastructure, are expected to be a major factor in spawning or exacerbating internal, regional, and international political and military conflicts. As this tragic story unfolds, there is a projected increase in human trafficking of all kinds, including within existing global supply chains.
Unfortunately, those institutions we rely on to address problems of such magnitude seem stuck.
The current systems developed to support continual human consumption and growth are not tailored to solve problems arising from unchecked harvesting of natural resources for a rapidly expanding population. National governments, international agencies, and global NGOs hampered by their traditional cultures, entrenched bureaucracies, and legacy infrastructures, are unable to respond to a crisis of global scale fully, effectively, and quickly.
In contrast, individuals have the will to collaborate. With the scale of the crisis is so abundantly clear and continuous, and with continuous reminders of its existence, they are ready to work together to make a change. What they have lacked are the tools and shared working venue to do so. Until now.
A MAJOR COLLECTIVE EFFORT IS REQUIRED AND HAS JUST BEGUN. THIS MUST BE A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT!
PHOENIX is the signature project of World Systems Solutions (WSS). Founded in 2021 by author, technologist, organizational consultant and spiritual teacher, John Jones. WSS is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to sparking globally coordinated collaboration to address urgent and complex interrelated global crises that are generating destructive climate changes.
WSS rallies individuals and organizations for a sustainable future by promoting cooperation and sustainable technology. Our WSS initiatives, like the PHOENIX Platform, utilize responsible AI to take on issues such as climate change, ethical AI use, and societal equality. We believe in co-building flexible systems that encourage collective responsibility for our planet. Our goal is to trigger positive, healthy coordinated and aligned change for everyone's benefit.
In cooperation with governments, NGOs, international agencies and higher education institutions worldwide, the board, staff and facilitators of WSS will work to address the root causes of the climate crisis through the development of next generation digital social support and collaboration networks, public intensive workshops for changemakers and through public education.
With the development of PHOENIX, we intend to offer accessible tools which support true positive social change to anyone and everyone ready to play an active and impactful role in addressing climate change and all its associated crises.
We are working to ensure that the AI embedded in this engine of social change is deployed transparently and ethically for the benefit of all. The PHOENIX environment will leverage AI, other technologies and tools, and the collaborative capacities of the international community in service to humanity and our one and only planetary home.
It is now up to all of us to creatively re-organize and rapidly learn to work together courageously to rescue future generations of children and many other species from this clear and present threat. This will require collaborative restructuring of our collective life process including comprehensive scalable, rapid empowerment and education of as many youth, women and diverse populations as possible. Adaptation, reduction and recycling are not enough to move the needle on the polycrisis. Attaining true climate crisis resilience requires addressing far more dimensions of life than were previously realized.
In a time when the rapid and unfettered development of AI often mirrors that of prior technologies that were released without consideration of potential risks, WSS is committed to ensuring that PHOENIX is a model of a responsible AI environment, protecting both inputs and outputs by users. Development is underway with these goals in mind:
- Sustainability, Renewal and Reharmonization with the Earth AI
- Collaboration Technology
- Holistic Solutions Development and Deployment
- Large Scale Collaboration
- Completely Free and Accessible to Users
- Equality and Inclusivity
HOW CAN PHOENIX ADVANCE OUR COLLECTIVE WORK TO SOLVE THE CLIMATE CRISIS THROUGH EFFECTIVE HUMAN COLLABORATION?
A platform where governments, organizations and individuals can come together collaboratively to create pipelines of green projects while economically and socially benefiting all through solving the global climate and interrelated crises.
The current design framework for the PHOENIX platform is represented above and involves three integrated engines all supporting each other in a governed and incentivized process by an underlying Decision Support AI.
ORGANIZATION NETWORK ENGINE
The Organizational Network Engine is an AI-based platform designed to facilitate collaborative working relationships on a global scale and manage large-scale change projects, particularly focused on climate initiatives. This platform serves as a nexus for NGOs, international government institutions, agencies, and corporations, providing a space for collaborative connections and partnerships to be formed. It would provide the tools to enable these groups and individuals to generate and manage large transdisciplinary green projects and sustainability efforts. It would allow sharing of vetted pooled information that could be utilized to inform the long term sustainability of any initiative and reduce waste and rework, redundancy and maximize efficient utilization of scarce resources. It also allows groups to learn from each other’s experience. In terms of funding and resource management, it is intended to operate as a collective, highly integrated strategic system, drawing support from wealthy philanthropists, contributing nations, green impact investors, and organizations to finance transformative green projects.
Our world does not currently have a system that integrates collaborative efforts in a open sourced way that can share and integrate learnings, information, data and offer catalytic rapid change support that can clearly be understood and quantified. We need a way for organizations and individuals to proactively come together to develop projects vs. reacting to ever increasingly complex crises in siloed, not equitable ways after the damage is done. The focus of all projects in the network would be on renewing ecosystems, reharmonizing humanity with nature, and managing any scale of precisely aligned green projects and initiatives within a comprehensive project management environment. The Decision Support AI and Green Tokenization model discussed below would support the integrity of the intentions of the projects as well as offer an incentive model for optimal outcomes, systemic integrity and collaborative participation that serve the common good. The Collaboration Engine would support these project teams to create projects that go beyond just iterative improvements or band aid approaches into highly co-creative, innovative and scalable models for comprehensive change.
COLLABORATION ENGINE
Imagine a system that supports human beings working constructively with anyone in the world, breaking down barriers such as belief systems, values and biases in order to better serve the world. These barriers generate the scenario where humanity takes one step forward and two steps backward in approaching the climate crisis. In order to bring truly sustainable projects forth in the world we need to learn to work together in new ways and base our decisions upon aggregate, collaboratively arrived at knowledge and data.
As Albert Einstein famously stated. “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” The Phoenix Collaboration Engine is being designed as an AI-assisted system that empowers team collaboration in a way that shifts existing individual motivations from personal gain, safety or control toward functional co-creation based on values that generate sustainability, reharmonization and regeneration of our ecosystems. The system allows us to learn to work together across cultures, disciplines, genders, nationalities or races in ways not previously possible. This involves breaking down non-collaborative tendencies and establishing integrous team agreements, with just-in-time education, AI-supported facilitation, and continuous evolution of the team process support environment.
The system is being designed to learn and evolve from the experience of the teams creating projects and to train all other project teams to positively enhance any future project development. This engine has ongoing interaction with all teams in the Organizational Network Engine and helps optimize projects throughout all steps in the project development pipeline that generates GHG credits to be sold in the ClimateScale Engine GHG & Green Projects Marketplace. The developed capacities of the the integrated platform components accelerate project development and delivery, are enhanced at each step by the Decision Support AI and are governed by the tokenization model to incentivize the highest collaborative potential.
ClimateScale
ClimateScale, through its innovative user interface and decision support capacities, empowers humanity to effectively combat the climate crisis by providing easy access to greenhouse gas offsets, high-impact project credits, and opportunities to contribute to sustainability initiatives. This would be a venue for marketing green project credits developed through the PHOENIX project pipeline to be showcased and generate GHG offset market development and support. Functioning as a crucial support system for global transformation, ClimateScale enhances the integrity of green projects and thereby helps to direct investment towards establishing new green enterprises.
Each project moving through the PHOENIX project pipeline generates GHG credits that can be purchased in the ClimateScale marketplace. This resultant profit becomes an investment in the future—supporting our children, the planet and all species.
Notably, the PHOENIX platform also accommodates future, as yet undefined, green impact project additionalities by incorporating elements in projects’ social impacts, such as local economy building, education, empowerment of women, diversity inclusion, integrous equality and the integration of local indigenous wisdom into green projects. Furthermore, ClimateScale actively promotes greenhouse gas education, thus offering decision support for credit purchasers.
DECISION SUPPORT AI
The Assessment and Decision Support AI system stands at the forefront of environmental sustainability technology, playing a pivotal role in enhancing the credibility of offset and greenhouse gas (GHG) projects that are generated by the PHOENIX platform through ClimateScale, as well as building the overall GHG markets and the public’s view of their integrity. This advanced system utilizes impartial mathematical algorithms to objectively evaluate projects, and measures their progress towards optimal outcomes.
All projects on the PHOENIX platform will be evaluated by this AI. The AI assesses the qualities and metrics of a project, allows the prototyping of solutions, and identifies potential corruption while improving the integrity of all projects. This component’s capacity supports all other PHOENIX platform systems.
The Decision Support AI works by conducting quality and integrity checks, scrutinizing the actual mitigation of carbon or methane, the number of trees planted and adherence to United Nations standards for meeting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and supporting comprehensive greenwashing mitigation. The AI also focuses on the optimal project return on investment and future viability of projects, ensuring they serve as effective investment vehicles for humanity and the planet's future.
This revolutionary tool contributes to addressing the climate crisis by providing real-time insights, enabling informed actions, and features environmental monitoring, scenario modeling, predictive analytics, impact assessment, adaptation planning and a collaboration platform for stakeholders.
GREEN TOKENIZATION MODEL
The tokenization system within PHOENIX monitors, measures, and validates every developmental phase of green impact projects and the dynamics of the stakeholders that produce them, ensuring their integrity and verifying maximum positive environmental and social impacts. The Green Tokenization System supports global evolutionary steps toward digital transparency, aligning participants’ decisions on the platform with the UN's adoption of tokenized transactions, financial instruments, and project tracking. It serves as a governance, ethics, and evolution-of-values tool with integrous metrics, thus preventing greenwashing and maintaining platform integrity.
Tokens issued on the platform can be utilized for on-platform resource exchange, transactions, project and participant grading, and evaluation. They support project resource bartering capacity and serve as proof of project and green effort quality. Tokens are non-convertible back into world currencies and are created through infusions of capital by external or on-platform entities (investors, philanthropic donors, government funds, United Nations funded efforts, corporations).
Projects are evaluated based on scientific understanding and sustainability principles, with the Decision Support AI providing quantitative assessments. Organizations participating in PHOENIX can earn green tokens as a measure of their contribution to sustainability, this tokenization serving as a scoring system and reputation management system and metric for alignment with sustainability goals. These tokens incentivize organizations, enhancing their reputation and potentially unlocking additional rewards. The platform operates transparently, making its governance processes and evaluation criteria publicly available, ensuring accountability and building collective trust.
The Green Tokenization System provides continuous feedback for improvement, allowing organizations to recognize and address gaps in sustainability efforts. The tokens represent values such as the sustainable creation of a fully green economic system, resilience, renewal, and replenishment of the ecosystem, reharmonization of humanity with nature, reduction of pollutants, and alignment of innovations and technology developments with these values. Accumulating green tokens can allow the granting of access to resources, funding, and support for high-scoring organizations and projects. The platform fosters networking and collaboration opportunities, creating a self-aware community dedicated to sustainable development. Ultimately, by incentivizing sustainable practices, the Tokenization System aims to drive real change towards environmental conservation and social responsibility.
The integration of the elements mentioned above results in a unique design that offers the world an opportunity to choose a healthier future. Until now our choices have been fragmented, competitive and divided in their approaches and, as a result, we have only been able to “rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic” versus collectively steer in a healthy direction. We need a venue and methodology backed by technology to make this happen. Then humanity can collectively choose which direction we will go.
RESTORING WHAT WE LOVE
“There is a need for a global shift in consciousness, for a recognition of the absolute necessity to love others as equal to or more important than ourselves, and to love the natural environment as equal to ourselves.”
- John Jones, World Systems Solutions CEO
Talking about change is easy. Making change is hard. Especially when we feel we are doing so alone. PHOENIX removes the isolation that keeps us from working together fully, consciously and effectively on the most meaningful challenge of our time. It allows people to lean into their highest natures and have the courage to listen, respectfully respond to ideas, make a positive contributions, and find new partners to make our world, our communities, and our neighborhoods safer, happier, and healthier.
WSS’ launch of PHOENIX is an audacious undertaking rooted in a single vision: halting the global climate crisis and generating comprehensive sustainability. The challenge is formidable but through the support of insightful, forward-looking collaborators, especially as we build this revolutionary online environment for social change, we know that it can be done.
To some degree, everyone bears some responsibility for the current trajectory of our climate. It is also true that we have been led to believe that we have almost no control over our collective destiny. This is not so. We all have agency, if we are willing to use it. And now, with the development of PHOENIX, we can combine our individual energy, creativity, intellect and commitment to restore the world we had wished for ourselves and desperately want for our children. It is up to us
We ask that you consider joining us now in making PHOENIX a reality and taking that first step, with so many others like you, to giving something back to this planet that has given everything to us.
SUPPORTING THE DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PHOENIX PLATFORM
World Systems Solutions hosts ongoing global workshops:
CERF | Climate Emergency Response Forums
CERF is an ongoing expanding series of in-person workshops, convenes high-level stakeholders from various disciplines to address the world's most pressing challenges. In this dynamic workshop setting, we leverage the unique skills of these diverse groups to forge new networks and identify innovative solutions, catalyzing significant advancements in resolving the climate crisis and generating true sustainability. CERF's efforts are specifically tailored to support the development of core capacities of the PHOENIX Platform as a holistic global utility and sustainability focused platform-based infrastructure.
These workshops provide a practice space for collaborative innovation. They serve to create an evolving model of transdisciplinary collaboration and understanding of the PHOENIX paradigm. CERF is already creating an expanding transdisciplinary network that is growing the early adopters, messengers, and designers of the Phoenix platform and is building key partnerships and accelerating the platform’s development.
QUOTES FROM PARTICIPANTS:
“It’s revolutionary to be able to see all of these magnificent people that have come from worldwide, and I’m grateful to be a part of it.” - Raamen
“Hope without results is nothing. The idea of this whole thing is collaboration. Climate change is going to affect everywhere on the globe.” - Rob
“I trust that there’s an infrastructure in place that will keep checking in, and that there’s a level of accountability so that we can keep this fire going.” - Temple
“We encouraged each other to think differently; to reimagine new values, new systems and new technologies, but based on inclusive innovation and growth for the sake and benefit of the whole.” - Aunkh
“I truly believe this is an organization to get involved with; they have an amazing staff, board and facilitation team; an org you definitely want to get involved with around climate change and the activation of future solutions.” - Angel
“The most impactful thing that I’ve found, (at CERF) coming from very diverse backgrounds, cultures, ideas and walks of life, we found common ground about the environmental issues we want to tackle; about concrete solutions creation and delivery proposals. All of this is going to be truly significant for the world that WSS is doing.” - Nicolas
EmpowerED Program | Educational Workshops
WSS understands that empowering education is a lynchpin in humanity’s ability to solve the climate crisis and build a healthy future. Our current education system is not keeping up with the pace of technology and the rapid advancement of AI, nor is it adequately preparing youth for the present global crises. As a result, a fundamental redesign of the education system will need to be effected to empower youth to take charge of their own futures. There are many new models of education being developed that carry necessary elements which need to be integrated into the mainstream paradigm of learning. In support of this, WSS has created an ongoing series of free, virtual educational workshops, providing a space where those across the globe, especially youth, women and underrepresented groups, can collaborate and learn how they can participate in climate crisis resolution. In this way they can co-create a new educational system and resultant future work environment where they are effectively empowered to address the challenges that they will be required to meet and transcend in an uncertain future. This is an opportunity for youth, youth organizations, university leadership, curriculum developers, AI leaders, climate experts and government officials to come together to rapidly redesign education to map to global sustainability.
This education system will be supported by the PHOENIX platform and the understandings brought forth in these workshops will be integrated in to its design, creating an ever more powerful new learning model for all of humanity. As the program expands and this information can be aggregated into the system with its core capacities, education can be designed to support the common goals of sustainability, reharmonization with the planet and regeneration of ecosystems. These rolling workshops are intended to foster humanity’s capacity to align, integrate and co-creatively build towards peaceful solutions for the future generations of this planet.
OUR TEAM
The World Systems Solutions team, currently comprised of over 40 members and continuing to expand, leverages its transdisciplinary expertise and global diversity across five continents to actively bring the WSS Vision and Mission to life.
All of these programs are actively being developed and executed by World Systems Solutions, Inc and we invite you to learn more about any that interest you. We accept sponsorship for workshops, and donations toward any or all of the elements we have described. Our full funding deck or business plans and phase development, can be shared to provide understanding of how your valuable contribution will be allocated.
PROGRAM BUDGET OVERVIEW
World Systems Solutions is currently developing the four foundational pillars of the PHOENIX Platform, as well as our two rolling workshop series (CERF and EmpowerED). Budget numbers include organizational and platform development, staffing, operational costs, and management of volunteers’ and interns’ time.
WE CAN DO THIS TOGETHER AND ONLY TOGETHER
As you come to the end of this document, we invite you to come back to the story of the family in Mariposa that lost their lives in extreme heat. This story is a small one, and that said, it represents something we must accept at this time in our history. We are not prepared for the detrimental effects of the climate crisis and all it will affect under our current world systems. By the time we learn to protect ourselves, so many lives will be lost that we may only be left to rebuild and grieve the pain of our own misunderstanding.
At World Systems Solutions, we hope to create a system that allows us to choose differently and be empowered with the tools to take clear effective action, intelligently and collectively. You can support a new healthier paradigm by helping to a create the system that allows this beautiful potential future to emerge. We are so grateful to you for taking the time, care and focus to review our Case for Support. We look forward to learning from your insights and for mutually rewarding collaboration and to learn how we may develop together with you.