One critical insight above all others is necessary to understand how climate intelligence will alter the terrain of human activity in coming years and decades:
The climate crisis is NOT a “niche issue” or “single-issue” challenge; it touches everything we do, in every area of our lives. The climate is a planetary system that influences the conditions lived by living organisms in every ecosystem, at all times.
Historically, we have engaged with Earth’s climate system through weather, asking questions about rainfall, drought, farming and floods:
- Will we be able to grow enough food during the growing season?
- Will the design of this roof hold the snow that is coming in winter?
- Is the thickness of walls and/or size of windows optimal to maintaining indoor temperatures?
- Do we have good clothing to get us through this storm?
- Do we need boats, and do we know where high ground is?
It turns out, these are also climate resilience questions. As climate system stability is disrupted by global heating, we are learning that everything we do naturally ties into or is affected by climate considerations. Understanding those connections is climate intelligence. Understanding the viability and competitive advantage of a given enterprise requires understanding its embedded climate intelligence (ECI).
Sound decision-making in the age of embedded climate intelligence — as a personal and national security imperative — requires extraneous core insights (also, incidentally, “ECI”) that attach market value to a wider landscape of critical resilience value.
- Extraneous core insights are insights that directly affect the core value and activities of an enterprise or institution, but which come from factors outside the scope of that entity’s operations.
- Understanding embedded climate intelligence, which is necessary to limit climate-related risk and vulnerability, means detailing extraneous core insights that will impact the health and resilience of your operations.
DECIDE (the Detailed Embedded Climate Intelligence Data Engine) is a collaborative innovation effort, by Geoversiv and Liberate Energy, in support of Resilience Intel, to build a foundational data integration strategy for aligning science, metrics, and financial insights, to routinely and reliably expand the climate intelligence of embedded in everyday practice. A number of technical challenges are key to establishing an operational DECIDE service:
- Science translation — An Earth-science decision-support system, integrating data from diverse fields of inquiry, and in particular outside of a given geographical or ecological region.
- Upstream-downstream interactions — The climate system, and the water cycle, deliver feedbacks from far beyond the boundaries of a given local territory, that nevertheless impact the likely state of health and resilience of the more local natural systems.
- Data efficiencies — A key question in the building of a DECIDE system would be how to achieve the high-efficiency of data production, processing, tracking, and cross-referencing necessary to ensure general fairness to all parties.
- Right-scaling — To what extent can we combine in-house and locally relevant data with global data systems across sectors, to achieve meaningful DECIDE insight for all actors?
The DECIDE system will integrate locally generated data and decision parameters, with regional, national, and planetary-scale Earth systems data, Resilience Intel climate-smart finance information, and client-specific real-time inquiries. It will use AI-enabled synaptic distributed ledger technologies to translate raw insights from the variety of data sources into localized end-user-relevant information.

An analogy might be how we count on weather apps, and also GPS and mapping apps, to provide us with information we can deploy in our personal planning, in the moment, as needed. Do I need an umbrella today? How can I best avoid climate-related market risk, while fulfilling this everyday operational need?
To achieve maximum efficiency for end users, the DECIDE system will integrate with the Resilience Intel Consortium of technical and strategic partners, facilitate, support and draw from Resilience Intel ‘situation rooms’, and provide advanced subjective analysis about emerging paradigm shifts in:
- resilience value measurement and financing,
- related market dynamics,
- clean investment priorities, and
- technological change.
Every decision is a choice to favor one possible world and negate another. The nature of personal freedom is that our choices are personal, but our freedom is degraded if the choices of others reach beyond the personal and generate unmanageable harm and cost to the wider world. At industrial scale, these excesses eat away at all of the possible health and freedom we hope to shape and enjoy.

These are not philosophical considerations; they are becoming a national security priority, a leading driver of innovation, and a structural market imperative.
As more businesses commit to science-based targets for decarbonization and the building of resilience value, and nations develop economy-wide national climate action plans, operating at all levels of authority and market influence, negative externalities will be greatly reduced, and business models that depend on them to generate return on investment will fail.

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Joseph Robertson
Joseph is Executive Director of Citizens' Climate International. He is the lead strategist supporting the Acceleration Dialogues (diplomatic climate-solutions roundtables) and Resilience Intel—an effort to move the world to 100% climate-smart finance. Joseph represents Citizens’ Climate in the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, the UNFCCC negotiations, and other UN processes, and is founder of Geoversiv. His articles appear from time to time in the Guardian. He served as Interim Director for the Food System Economics Commission from April through November 2020, and is a senior advisor to EAT for sustainable finance. He is a lead contributor to the Earth Intelligence podcast.