Mini-Course - Actionable Climate Knowledge

The Idea of Actionable Knowledge

This Mini-Course explores the idea of "actionable knowledge" in the context of climate change decision-making. If you are exploring this Mini-Course on-line you will need to click on each thought in turn to see the text associated with each thought. If you are accessing this Mini-Course on your Mac or PC your access to the Mini-Course is much more efficient. You can simply hover your mouse over a thought and the associated text will pop up for review. No need to click on one thought after another. Instead, accessing the material is basically instantaneous.

Infinite information about climate change is available today to anyone with an internet connection. But as Carla O'Dell's and Woodrow Wilson's insightful quotes suggest, it's not easy to get the information you need. In a perfect world the internet would make it possible for us to always have the "right" information at our fingertips for whatever climate-relevant decision we happen to be facing at that moment. But we don't.

Here is a very practical example of what "actionable knowledge" means. We were working with a Fortune 100 company whose executives saw climate change almost exclusively as a corporate social responsibility issue, not as "material" business issue. The image shown below ended up on the screen - an estimate of the increase in area likely to be burned every year by forest fires across ecosystems in the Western United States as temperatures rise (%'s shown are per 1oC of temperature change).

This single image totally changed the direction of the conversation we were having with the decision-makers. Several of them noted that "given the implications for our supply chains and distribution channels that I see in the image, now I get why we should be thinking about climate change as a business issue."

This image was actionable knowledge for those executives, and led the company to fundamentally change course on how it was approaching climate change. The same idea applies to virtually any audience - the information needed to influence their thinking exists; the challenge is figuring out what that information is!

Explore the thoughts at left to further explore the general idea of actionable knowledge, and the associated PPT slides that will pop up in the Notes Field.

You can also explore another Mini-Course that applies this idea to actually solving climate change: Mini-Course - What a Successful Climate Strategy Might Look Like