The Geoversiv Mission

Geoversiv is a social and environmental change venture, focused on sorting, curating, and publishing critical science insights and information that can support informed, value-building decision-making. Our publications and projects aim to support, connect and empower innovative projects oriented toward achieving social good, through promotion of:

Knowledge can and should do heroic work. Hope is a commitment to connect action to consequence. We are committed to making sure our programs align with these principles, while empowering people to make more good possible. This is why we support collaborations like Resilience Intel and our new flagship partnership for facilitating a sustainable future of mutual thriving: The Climate Value Exchange.

Founder’s Letter for 2025

Dear friends,

As we enter the year 2025, we must acknowledge the goal of building a livable future for humankind is facing powerful headwinds; climate pollution is still increasing, even as climate disruption and nature breakdown, and the many related costs, are getting worse. Political processes and geopolitical dynamics are making it more difficult to address these challenges directly, seriously, and in the ways that would be best for people, for nations, and for nature.

We must recognize these challenges, because we cannot overcome them unless we do, but we must also remain committed to no-nonsense optimism. By that I mean something very specific: under no circumstances should we walk away from the hard work of imagining and creating the best possible future—the optimal outcome.

The optimal is the best within the realm of the possible; because it is both possible and better (more conducive to health, happiness, and harmony, and more reflective of common sense and reasoned action), it is always more feasible than negative trends suggest. It is our task to discover and breathe life into, then act on, the strategies that get us to that better future.

The optimist and the pessimist are not converse actors because one hopes and the other doubts while taking action. Their difference lies in their approach to action: The optimist focuses on doing the hard work to get to the better future; the pessimist takes refuge in false prophecy and surrenders the field of action to those not committed to the better outcome.

So, I bring us back to that core insight that will define our age whether we like it or not: The climate system is a geophysical fabric that makes our ethical interrelationship into physical reality. The climate system connects upstream and downstream actors across sectors, interests, and regions. It connects our sharpest wits and our deepest deficits—and our ability (or inability) to cooperate to solve problems—to people who will live hundreds of generations from now.

We are connected by what we do, what we fail to see, what we seek, and what we create. We are connected by not just our capability and industry, but also by our various ways of being vulnerable.

This image shows a wildfire-fighting airplane dropping water on wildfires that ravaged Greece in 2009. We want to recognize the courageous people confronting the currently ongoing wildfires around Los Angeles (detailed reporting)—and those happening around the world, throughout the year—and the risks they take to make safety possible for so many others. Photo credit: Filippos Sdralias.

In 2025, while much of the political tumult of the world seems determined to focus on how a given nation, institution, sector, or leader can posture to communicate something that looks like strength, I believe we need to focus attention on how we are vulnerable—as individuals, households, communities, countries, regions, and sectors. For most of us, most of these scales are relevant to our vulnerability; a great challenge most of us share is that we do not have, or no how to achieve, influence at most of these scales.

This urgent state of cognitive dissonance, affecting our sense of security and opportunity, may explain a great deal about why trust has become so broken in so many ways, across the world, in recent years. As threats and risks proliferate, as more costs fall on people in their everyday lives, without improvements to income and opportunity, the sense that people have been abandoned comes together and intensifies.

This year, Geoversiv will support enhanced understanding of vulnerability, at different scales, and insights that allow for informed, inventive, constructive crisis response, through two primary initiatives:

The Climate Value Exchange—a partnerships platform launched one year ago, to facilitate discussion and discovery of multilateral cooperative strategies to mainstream and accelerate climate action;
The Navigator—a new cooperative news gathering and reporting project, intended to play the role of countering disinformation by providing a practical alternative, a place to find trusted sources, scientific evidence, and a diversity of options for solving problems and creating conditions for a more optimal future.

The Climate Value Exchange will provide opportunities for leaders, institutions, and stakeholders, to come together to advance climate-smart banking, trade, and local enterprise, in line with vulnerability reduction and sustainable development. It will also support work toward a range of Climate Value metrics, including examples like Resilience Value and Good Food Finance.

The Navigator is a work in progress, with core infrastructure and founding partnerships still in development. The goal is to establish a news source that is flexible, principled, consistent, and useful to a broad and diverse audience, while linking to and supporting publications that do the hard work well and make their readers’ lives richer and their outlook more insightful.

As always, the work of securing a future that works for everyone is still ongoing. What is new is the ascendancy of unabashedly destructive and counterproductive voices. To make the future we hope for more likely, we must continue to seek, imagine, learn, connect, and cooperate. Big problems don’t get solved by bluster; they get solved by cooperation.

Best wishes for a vibrant, healthy, and world-building 2025,

Joseph Robertson
Founder, Geoversiv Earth Intelligence