Your new wellspring of value

Company: build resilience while your competitors don't, and you will attract the customers, talent and investors of the future. City: build resilience while other urban areas don't, and you will attract the residents and enterprises of the future as they increasingly look for the most adaptive places to relocate — Destination Cities, as they're called, for climate migrants fleeing more vulnerable places struck by extreme events.

Do so following our Deep Adaptability framework — act on long-term science, with behavior science, resilient minds, the new Hope Taxonomy, future-defining innovations, Cypriana, etc. — and this new wellspring of value will be greater still. For companies, it is one of the two main pathways to corporate value in the climate-defined future we have in COMMON.

The other is doing your part to make sure everyone else in your industry, community, city and around the world also adapts and does so with the greatest possible ambition — because adaptation is by nature interdependent. You are affected by climate impacts felt by your employees, customers, suppliers, distribution centers, and the markets where your do business. Globally and across the U.S. — particularly given President Biden's whole-of-government and all-of-society resilience ambition — an entire adaptation ecosystem has emerged and is awaiting corporate leaders. We live to join you on that exciting journey.

That's the dual-focus of our Consulting arm, to take you the entire way, in addition to the Communications & Culture we provide. Wherever you are in the action spectrum — moving on climate resilience already, having hired an external group and assembled an internal team, or still on the sidelines but deeply concerned about the effect of climate change, figuring out the best way to deal with the threat — we offer four Consulting pathways to fit your needs:

STRATEGY

The nature of Deep Adaptability is such as to go first, right there when you decide to adapt and make the imperative investments.

Before those important steps, think the future through, weigh the Five Principles of Deep Adaptability, and see, truly see, the wellspring of value that comes with being one of the world’s most adaptive cities and companies and helping the world adapt. Then you’re ready for the rest.

That’s what we do with STRATEGY. We begin with a 60-day Climate Resilience Landscape report and leadership workshop. You know when you start piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, until you “see” the full picture? Yup. That’s what this is.

Our first premise is that climate modeling and forecasting are pieces in the puzzle, important as they are. But far too many organizations today are under the illusion that models tell the whole story, or sufficient to assess risk and act on it. Climate change, though, particularly Next Wave, is so unpredictable, non-linear, compounding and variable, that you need a different eye with which to design the right STRATEGY.

BASTION

Our solution for facilities and the built environment, because if there is a nexus in the world that calls for cutting edge, beyond code, Next Wave adaptation against post 1.5C extreme climate, it is the places and facilities where people live, work and play.

We rely on RELi as our guide. Yes, it's actually pronounced rely, and it's the world's new and most advanced adaptation standard for the built environment, administered by the U.S. Green Building Council. It informs and inspires our work because of its holistic approach to adaptation:

• Beyond Now. Create adaptation against every type of climate change, today and far into the future.
• Beyond Code. Because the future will be different than the past and present on which building codes are based.
• Beyond Walls. Reach outside your facilities to integrate the human/social component, internal and external.

For the initial and ongoing risk assessments that guide our work, we collaborate with CRC, where Alex is an Advisory Board member. Its Risk Footprint solution is truly best-in-class.

C-CAM

This solution works best if you're a middle-market company with advanced sustainable or ESG practices and do not yet have an adaptation team in place. Our group can step in with the Corporate Climate Adaptation Model, or C-CAM, developed by Alex and explained fully in this post, and help you turn your existing sustainability leadership into adaptability leadership.

The model's uniqueness and world-best effectiveness lies in the integration of three frameworks in one:

• TCFD, the world's leading standard to manage risks and opportunities.
• FIVE TASKS, our very own platform to help you manage people and stakeholders.
• The 4Rs of Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation framework to integrate and execute all resilience actions.

CASCADE

This is where the "Beyond walls" principle takes on a whole new meaning, where you become part of the broader movement to cascade climate adaptation across all of society and the economy. When it comes to resilience, no business is an island, to borrow from poetry. You're never fully resilient until everyone else in your local and global value chain is, as well. You must all have the capacity to take climate hits and keep going. CASCADE helps three ways:

• Biden's American Revolution. In the U.S., we help you capitalize on the massive cascading of resilience by all federal agencies in everything they do in the country and around the world (procurement, funding, real estate, investments, more), as Alex explains in this column. New laws loom to create a clean, resilient economy. The America Is All In coalition is matching that with a whole-of-society cascade across the country, and we help you capitalize on those adaptation opportunities, as well.
• Adaptation Ambition under the Paris Agreement. Since becoming the world's guiding climate document in 2015, the world's attention has been on its Article 4 decarbonization provisions. As that agenda runs quickly out of time, attention must shift decidedly toward Articles 7 & 8, the adaptation sections. That's where we come in, with you. We're looking for companies and cities to lead — and to gain, given the myriad opportunities that await in a world of Adaptation Ambition.
• Inventing the Future. Perhaps the biggest such opportunity is innovation. As we say in COMMON Future, the future will be dramatically different than the past we know and the present we master, and that means innovating just about everything. We help you match future resilience needs in your countries and around the world with your current and future innovation capabilities, and then scale those solutions with urgency to meet the moment.