Help: Actionable Climate Knowledge

Overcoming Knowledge Barriers

Google “climate change” and you’ll get almost 500 million hits in less than a second. Indeed, almost any climate-relevant search term will generate millions of hits. That’s an overwhelming amount of information, and it is little surprise that most people involved with climate change have given up trying to track and understand more than the narrowest slice of the problem.

Yet business decision-makers are increasingly expected to understand the complex business implications of climate change, and to incorporate those implications into risk assessments, enterprise risk management, supply chain management, scenario planning, and other business decision-making.

Carla O’Dell has noted in this era of infinite information: “If only we knew what we know!” What if companies could access the actionable knowledge they need for more robust climate-relevant decision making?

We’ve all experienced actionable knowledge moments, when a particular piece of information causes a light bulb to come on in our heads. Early in our climate work with a Fortune 100 company, for example, we realized that the company’s decision-makers saw climate change only as a CSR issue, not a material business issue. We changed course to explore how climate change and/or climate policies might influence the company’s global business model. The image below ended up on the screen, mapping out expected changes to Western fire regimes as temperatures rise (including an almost 700% increase in annual area likely to burn in parts of Colorado).

A light bulb came on for several executives around the table; they immediately saw the implications of such changes for power lines, supply chains, and subsidiaries across the region. This one image changed the whole conversation, and led to the company’s first climate change scenario planning exercise. It was climate change actionable knowledge for them.

Just as there is almost infinite climate information available today, there is almost infinite actionable knowledge available. The problem is that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to actionable knowledge, and the "right" knowledge rarely gets to the right decision-maker at the right time. The Climate Web is designed to help change that.

The Climate Web takes a very different approach to helping you access actionable knowledge than is available to you through a typical internet search as illustrated below.

Continuing the fishing analogy, the graphic below illustrates the spear-fishing for knowledge that the Climate Web makes possible. Spear-fishing gives you a lot more control over what you catch than simply throwing your line into a lake.

You can learn a lot about the Climate Web at its website For help in identifying and accessing specific actionable climate knowledge for contact the Climatographers through our advisory website, or visit the Business Knowledge Products page  at the Climate Web.

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