Specific Decision-Making Support Tools

Business Climate Decision-Making Support Tools

Climate change is a complicated and politicized topic, and corporate decision-makers arrive at the topic from numerous perspectives ranging from a lack of knowledge or willful blindness to advanced risk management, leadership and advocacy objectives.

Depending on where a company's management sits on the continuum, different decision-support tools and business responses are likely to be most useful. Several are profiled below based on how the Climate Web can best support business decision-making.

Keeping Track of Business Materiality - A Dashboard. The Climatographers Materiality Dashboard is an online tool that can be reviewed in minutes, letting you track the changing landscape of climate risks and opportunities in a way never before possible. It builds upon thousands of hours of climate risk and opportunity information aggregation and analysis, and translates that information into an ongoing assessment of the business materiality of more than 40 risk variables and temperature/policy scenarios.

Checking Business Assumptions - Assumptions Audit. Precisely because climate change is a complicated and politicized topic, many of the assumptions business decision-makers bring to the table about climate change are misleading or worse. Helping decision-makers challenge their own assumptions can be an effective way to change corporate thinking about and responses to climate risks. The Climate Web is structured to support quick and cost-effective Assumptions Audits around climate change risk and opportunity topics.

Rapid Materiality Assessment. Decision makers of all kinds and at all levels are constantly balancing the priority they assign to competing problems and opportunities. Any addition to the corporate “priority list” has to be considered sufficiently important to the organization’s mission or values by management. When it comes to climate change, the critical question is: “Does climate change pose material risks or opportunities that as an organization we can’t afford to ignore, or that as an organization we want to pro-actively engage upon?”

In many cases the answer will vary depending on an organization’s vulnerability to the potential physical, policy, market, and other impacts of climate change, as well as the organization’s sensitivity to risk. The Climatographers' Rapid Materiality Assessment process helps a company assess the many factors involved. Click on the link icon to learn more.

Scenario Planning. Companies are under more pressure to carry out scenario planing exercises relating to climate risk. But there are very different ways to go about scenario planning, with different advantages and disadvantages. The Climate Web contains much of the information companies needed to carry out alternative scenario planning strategies, and our Guide to Scenario Planning offers users a comprehensive roadmap..

Adapting to Deep Climate Uncertainties - A Positioning Strategy. There is no way to reliably predict the future of climate change, or potential climate policies and measures. This is particularly true when it comes to business-relevant time frames of years to decades. Companies may realize that their competitive advantage is vulnerable to climate change, whether through physical, regulatory, brand, legal, or other impacts. But there are so many uncertainties in play that even scenario planning will have trouble suggesting a path forward. The Climatographers' Positioning Strategy process does that.