Studies of significant changes to the Jet Stream—a fast-moving river of air that plays a major role in regulating climate patterns—show increasing risk of prolonged catastrophic drought and threats to the human food supply. Scientific American is reporting: extreme jet stream patterns like those of 2018 may be getting more common and more extreme, representing […]
In a company Letter to Clients and CEO Larry Fink’s annual Letter to CEOs, BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager—has declared it will from now on treat sustainability as its “new standard for investing”. The Letter to Clients takes the view that: Resilient and well-constructed portfolios are essential to achieving long-term investment goals. It goes on […]
2020 New Year’s Letter from Geoversiv’s Founder Dear Friends, As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, Geoversiv aims to reiterate the importance of embracing complexity, committing to critical thinking, and supporting the spread of creative collaborative innovation for social good and the health and wellbeing of people and planetary systems. In 2019, […]
How much do we value human freedom? For thousands of years people of all variety of experience and influence have debated whether free will exists and which universe would be more full of virtue and good fortune—one that is fated or one that is free. Today, technology is flooding our experience with hard-to-trace information and […]
A week before Christmas, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, wrote in the Financial Times that the UK is now stress-testing banks for climate risk and resilience. Specifically, he writes: Modelling for the full extent of climate-related financial risk is complex and challenging. Britain can lead the way next year, when we […]
Climate disruption is a story of unprecedented threat, globally and locally. It is also a story of unprecedented opportunity, at all levels. No one has ever faced a challenge of this scope, complexity, and scale. And yet, the daunting speed and complexity of the challenge is precisely what human intelligence was designed to deal with. […]
In July, The New York Times reported: The rating agency [Moody’s] bought a majority share in Four Twenty Seven, a California-based company that measures a range of hazards, including extreme rainfall, hurricanes, heat stress and sea level rise, and tracks their impact on 2,000 companies and 196 countries. In the United States, the data covers […]
During the 2018 United Nations Climate Change negotiations (the COP24), co-chairs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented the latest scientific findings about what would happen if the world warms by 1.5ºC on average above pre-industrial levels. It was a special plenary session, meaning every nation was represented, as well as every international agency, […]
Bottom-line thinking is about whether your way of doing business has a future. Common practice is to treat a high volume of accumulated profit or cash as a proxy for operational sustainability. But the history of empires, and of financial crashes, tells us this is not the case. Lean bottom-line management is one example of […]
When we scan the solar system for signs of life, we look for water. Earth life requires water. The whereabouts and availability of water on Earth are determined by geology, life, and activity in the climate system, which is made up of thermal energy flows moving between the atmosphere and the ocean. Biodiversity is driven […]
The following brief is an outcome document from the High-level Climate and Energy Dialogue held on April 20, 2017, at the UN Foundation in Washington, DC, as part of the series Accelerating Progress, Advancing Innovation. The dialogue was moderated by Rachel Kyte, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and CEO Sustainable Energy for All. The […]
Global heating is happening faster and with deeper compounding impacts than we had expected. Sir David King, former chief science advisor for the government of the United Kingdom, is calling for an upgraded long-term goal of net-zero by 2040. Simple arithmetic shows there is not enough money in circulation to cover the extreme costs of […]
