Visualizing our Changing Climate with Probable Futures

You're listening to Climate Rising, an official podcast of Harvard Business Schools, Business and Environment Initiative. What I saw was a failure of the business community, even the government community, but especially the investment community, to ask questions of climate science. Nobody knew how to ask a climate question. At the time, I had quite a lot of access to chief investment officers and investment investors around the world. And so I would ask them, have you ever asked a climate question at work? And everyone said no. Climate change is not just about warmer temperatures, it's about instability. And it's about the fact that we have never maintained civilization in a changing climate before. That is a paradigm shift. And so we're going to need new skills and tools, sensibilities and maybe even values to live well in that paradigm shift. This is Climate Rising, a podcast from Harvard Business School, and I'm your host Mike Toffel, a professor here at HBS. Today's episode is the first of several where we'll be discussing climate change adaptation. In this episode, I'm joined by the two leaders of probable futures. Spencer Glendon is the founder and Alison Smart is the executive director. Spencer is also currently serving as an executive fellow at HBS. Their organization provides online tools that help communicate how the climate is changing to enable leaders to better navigate climate risks. We'll discuss a five-step process managers can use to understand and manage climate risks in their organization. Here's my interview with Spencer Glendon and Alison Smart from probable futures. I'm Samir Patel, Editor in Chief at Quanta Magazine. Our mission at Quanta is to cover what we call basic or fundamental research in science and math. That means the kind of work that's driven by curiosity and discovery and the search for knowledge. We're interested in how and why everything around us works the way that it does. On our brand new show, The Quanta Podcast, you'll meet the writers and editors behind the magazine and together we'll explore the biggest ideas and the tiniest details. Join me for the Quanta Podcast, your weekly dispatch from the frontiers of science and math. Let me take a minute to tell you about another HBS podcast. If you're interested in how business leaders make decisions that shape industries and drive impact, I think you'll really enjoy listening to the founder mindset with Reza Satu, the brand new podcast from our colleagues at Harvard Business School Foundry. On climate rising, we often explore how companies tackle complex challenges. The founder mindset takes you inside those decisions. Reza sits down with founders like Reese Witherspoon, Kevin O'Leary, and Tim Ferris, and asks them to walk through how they actually make decisions in real time, especially under pressure. These conversations go beyond success stories. They dig into the trade-offs, the risks, and the mindset behind building something from the ground up. If you're curious how leaders navigate uncertainty and turn ideas into impact, this is a great lesson. Follow the founder mindset with Reza Satu on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Spencer and Allison, thank you so much for joining me here on climate rising. It's great to be here, Mike. Yes, great to be here. Let's start with some brief introductions. So Allison? On the executive director of probable futures, and we are a nonprofit climate literacy initiative. And what we do is make practical tools and educational resources available online for everyone everywhere. Okay, great. And Spencer. And I'm the founder of probable futures, and I work closely with Allison. Great. Now, I know from our prior conversations that you each have such interesting backgrounds. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to the concept of climate change for your current interest. So Spencer, let's start with you. My path to this place actually starts from my childhood. I grew up in an Arbor, Michigan, which was a prosperous place outside of Detroit, which was a really tragic place during my childhood. And I was just curious, why do bad things happen in some places, and good things happen in other places. And I wound up with a sort of varied career in investigating success and failure, you might think socially. And at one point that led me to be an engineer, another point that led me to be in banking, I then came to Harvard to get a PhD in economics. And I wound up in finance. And in finance, I was looking for good models, models that would tell you something about the future. I actually had the role of director of research at a large investment firm called Wellington Management. So I saw people's models of the future. And in that context, I encountered climate models and discovered they were better than all the financial models. They actually did predict the future accurately and had for 40 years. But nobody was using them. And so I got interested in how we could bring climate models that were good and not used into not just investing, but life in general. And in that quest, reached out into the science community to find people who might have a shared interest in that. And that's how Allison and I met. Great. And Allison, what did you take on the story from there? So where were you before when you met? And then tell us a little bit once you did meet what happened next. Prior to collaborating with Spencer to create probable futures, I was the vice president for strategy and advancement at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. And prior to that, I held leadership positions in the arts. Actually, I was in museums for about a decade prior to getting into the climate science world. And I was actually recruited to Woodwell not because I had a background in science, but because of my background in the arts. I had kind of built a career out of being an interpreter, a translator, a storyteller for academic and intellectual material, helping to translate it for general audiences. And so at the time, the scientists at Woodwell recognized that they really wanted help from people outside of their own discipline to help translate their work and make it resonant for average people like me. Got it. And so what prompted you each to leave the jobs that you had in order to found and build the organization you both work at now, probable futures? So from my side, what I saw was a failure of the business community, even the government community, but especially the investment community, to ask questions of climate science. And at the time, I had quite a lot of access to chief investment officers and investment investors around the world. And everyone said, no. And I said, well, I had, by this time, looked around for scientists who were willing to collaborate. And the Woodwell Climate Research Center was set up as a service-based organization, set up to answer practical questions, as opposed to a university where faculty are given free reign to do what they want and extend knowledge, but not with a customer in mind, in some sense. So one of the ways we describe our work is we're building bridges between climate science and culture. That culture could be a business culture, a finance culture, any culture. So I had come from the finance and business culture and met Alison Partway as she was trying to build the bridge from Woodwell out to the world. So she was building this outreach, and I was more or less the first person who reached out to say, we have the same idea. We're meeting halfway along this bridge. Yeah, and from your perspective, Alison? When we started to collaborate at Woodwell on this project to connect the finance world and climate science, part of that process was developing maps. Developing maps of what climate model data tells us about what the future might be like in a warming world. Straight forward things like how heat is going to change around the world, how precipitation is going to change, how much more probable drought risk will be. We started really to experiment with different kinds of communications tactics, one of them involving maps, and just started to see that there were ways to educate people about climate change and communicate about climate change that were different than what had been tried already. And we saw it be very effective with some of the target audiences that we were communicating with at that time. So we decided to take those communications materials outside of the purview of Woodwell and share it with the world. And part of the reason to name the endeavor, probable futures, is that space in between what is one and a half degrees like? What is two degrees like? Or two and a half degrees like? Was not populated. People didn't know what that would be like. And being able to see on a map how different the weather would be between one and a half and two degrees was even very illustrative to and shocking, frankly, to many scientists because there were enough research papers to validate the data. But using already existing data to just do curious investigations of different countries or different places is not really what scientists do. The pioneering science work had been done so they had to move on. And we discovered using this publicly available data that nobody was using could even surprise the scientists in a way that told us, "Okay, there's something here about making it vivid that really illustrates this in between between the far off and sort of hopeless apocalypse and the overly optimistic, unrealistic solving everything." We've been working together, the three of us, on creating some material that can be used in the classroom to help students and executives and executive education programs understand a bit about how do I as a manager think about adaptation? People from all different types of industries and geographies who listen to the podcast probably want to get a sense of, okay, adaptation, I've heard of it, I know about sea level rise, I know about storms and floods and hurricanes, but what does that have to do with me as an organizational manager? And so I thought it would be useful for us to talk through this five-step process that we've been developing together, but before we even doing that, let's just get some vocabulary on the table. And one of the things that we've talked about is the stability assumption. And so Spencer, you're the first one I remember telling that story to me, so can you talk about your description of the stability assumption and its implications and why it's a bad assumption? The amazing thing about climate science is not just that it predicts the future well, it explains the past remarkably well, and it explains this particular part of the past in a really powerful way, which is that human beings have been around since about 200,000 BCE, and for the first 190,000 years they were nomads and then they settled in 9500 BCE, or started settling and eventually settled all around the world. And this issue of settling is very interesting because what settlement is a form of planning, it's a form of anticipation, saying the crop I grow here will keep being the right crop to grow, the building I build will continue being appropriate. Well, it turns out that the average temperature of the atmosphere of Earth stayed within a very narrow band for 12,000 years, and that meant that we could start if you knew the past, you knew the future for an investor, this is basically no volatility or very, very low volatility, so you can assume it. And so what happened was that people stopped paying attention to the climate because it just was there and it got institutionalized in a set of assumptions. Some of those assumptions are verbal, like we just say, London is rainy, and that is, it's called the habitual present tense, so that means London always was rainy, is now rainy, always will be rainy. It's that assumption of stability, but it's in building codes and engineering standards. And it meant that consciously thinking about the climate was not done by very many people. The second part of that assumption means that if you're not thinking about climate change, you're assuming nothing will change, that it will stay the same. I think the best exposition of this is the assumption that the ocean will stay exactly where it is is embedded in all coastline property. And you think about that for a second, that's a really big assumption, like this big sloshing body of water will stay exactly right there. And so we can look back and say it was very stable. The same trees grew in the same place, same crops grew in the same place, and the ocean stayed in the same place for so long that actually we have an implicit model of stability where outside those bands of that narrow temperature range. So we need to now pay attention in a way that really we didn't have to before. And so first acknowledging I assumed stability and now asking how do I approach an unstable situation is a challenge and that's the challenge that's the beginning of this process. Something that we talk about a lot is that climate change is not just about warmer temperatures. It's about instability. Another piece of vocabulary that we've talked about is what you call first-order, second-order, and third-order risks. Why don't you talk through a little bit what that language means? So there's a lot of great work, much of which is reflected in your podcast on decarbonization. And what would be called mitigation, the mitigation of climate change, which is limiting the amount of warming. We were talking more about adaptation and resilience, which is dealing with the warming that's happening, understanding it, being prepared for it. And that's really a risk framework. We've tried to create a risk rubric. What we call a first-order risk is just what does the weather do? Does it rain hard? Is it very hot? Is it dry? Sort of what is the exogenous condition? It's actually the thing the models are good at. So we can actually ask the models how likely are various outcomes and then ask what might the effect be of those things, of a flood, of a heat wave, of a drought. The second-order risk is what happens immediately because of that? What's the consequence? Whether it's for human health or for agriculture or for any system that we're a part of? That's the stuff that we didn't have to worry about for a long time because the first-order ranges were embodied in building codes, insurance, etc. That ensured us against, that were built around and able to handle a range of second-order impacts. So the third-order is having had these things happen. How do people react? Do they move away? Do they act politically in some way? Do markets dry up? Does inflation go up? Do interest rates change? Does credit availability change? It's these human systems around how do they react to the new knowledge that this risk is now a much more real risk? And so if we use an example of this in the American West, there are years that are wet, followed by years that are dry, followed by years that are hot. That's the perfect recipe for forest fires, which is the wet year, fertilized lots of little growth, then the warm year grew lots of grass, which is good tinder, and then a hot dry year for the third year lights it on fire. Well, that means that the risk of wildfire has gone up. The second-order effect to the first-order is we get wildfires because of that sequence. The second-order's house is burned down, but the third-order is do people rebuild them? Do insurance rates change? Do people move away? But also things like health risk. There's been lots of now-smoking in the air. People start putting air cleaning devices in their homes all over that becomes a standard behavior. And you can think about this for any of these risks, but the third-order risk is how does the broader system respond to the reality that, oh, this is now part of our range of possible outcomes? Just want to make a point about why we decided to come up with this framework for assessing risk and understanding the ripple effects of climate impacts. And it's because climate change is going to impact every community, every industry, every business in very different ways. This is really a way to give people a tool set so that they can start to examine what climate change may mean for their community, whether that community is a business or an actual city or neighborhood or industry. So they could build the literacy to do that and start to examine those risks on their own. So let's talk about this five-step process to help managers think through adaptation. And it begins as many types of analyses do with sort of setting the system boundaries. So in this regard, we talk about locations and duration. And so when we think about locations, what are the options that we open up here? This is one of the most interesting parts to me as I came to this work was I realized how little of the world now functions thinking spatially. So maps used to be really, really valuable pieces of data. And then I learned when I started doing this work that nobody used maps and finance, nobody used maps even really in most levels of insurance. They were all two dimensional databases. And so the first part of this is thinking spatially. And then that raises questions about locations. So where are things? So the simplest is where are the assets? Where are the people? Who matter? And so that's pretty straightforward process of saying, okay, my buildings are these are the addresses. These are the geolocations of them. And then you start thinking about what are the systems they rely on? And so might you think, well, farm, it's very straightforward. We have a farm. It's in this place. This is where we grow things. But some farms are the plants grow because the rain falls there. And other they grow because rainfall somewhere else. And others grow because snowfall somewhere else and then gradually melts. And so being aware of what are the spatial relationships that make your work possible or your organization possible is sort of this this first step of scoping out. And then the second part is duration, which is how committed are you to some place? How long term are you planning? If you're planning short term, very short term you want weather forecasts. The longer the term goes, the more you're thinking about a range of possibilities. And this commitment to place. On the duration side, the go-to example of long term would be real assets. So we're going to invest a billion dollars in a wafer fab plant. We better really understand the environment around that wafer fab plant because it's an awful lot of money and you can't just flip it that easily. Are there other types of businesses or assets that we should be thinking about when we're thinking about the medium to long term? Well, the number one is actually municipalities or local governments or regional governments. But the government can't move. The place itself can't move. Miami can't be somewhere else. Paris can't be somewhere else. And so where there are place-specific institutions, almost all of those are implicitly in perpetuity. Nobody says, my hometown is only planned to be around this long. And so the longest term is forever. And forever is actually implicit in every town and city around the world. around the world. And that's why places like the Marshall Islands are so interesting and evocative because sea level rise will likely make them go away. And so there's already this horizon, this temporal horizon coming at them, which most of us are just not even attuned to thinking about. But so the longest term are places that have organizations. And what's interesting is, are the people who live there permanent? Are they, who is the long duration tenant? How long is the political person in office? But the true long duration institutions are these governments or quasi-governments that are responsible for a place. Place is their thing. I think there's a brand association too with place. We all think of Disney world as being in Florida. I mean, in truth, Disney is in lots of places other than Florida, but their brand is very tied to that place. Harvard's brand is very tied to Boston. So I think thinking about it in terms of brand association and also just kind of attachments to it, like personal attachments and cultural attachments to place. Yeah, it's interesting. When you talk about sort of the assumption of permanence of a city, and it's interesting because at least in the US, there's lots of cities that no longer are occupied. We call them ghost towns for some and others have retreated due to sea level rise, for example. But when you think about this in the current imagination in the movies, for example, it's always like post-apocalyptic when cities are no longer occupied. I took my wife on what could be one of the probably least promising vacations ever when I was in graduate school. I wanted to go to see several ghost towns. So we flew out to Las Vegas and rent at a car and just drove to the geolocation where there had been a town and there was no town because I wanted to see, what is it like when it just really goes away? And that's sort of the extreme version of what I said when I introduced myself was being from Detroit. There's this fear, like, will that become a ghost town? And Detroit had 1.9 million people, shortly before I was born in the 60s. And now it has about 600,000 people. And so there are 1.3 million people who went somewhere else. But that is something that's hard for us to think about. And most people are in places are built on the assumption that at least they'll stay even if not grow in perpetuity. I think there's a difference to here that climate science tells us a lot about the future. I mean, those ghost towns maybe couldn't foresee the economic changes, the population changes, or the technological changes that will have ended up leading to the disruption and the demise of that place. But we have climate science that tells us a lot about what the future will be like in a warming world. So it's really the first time in history that we have really good information about the future and we can make informed decisions about the future. Okay. So step one, scope of the analysis, locations and duration. Step two, identifying the physical risks via climate models. And these are what we already called first order risks. Now there's lots of tools out there, some proprietary, some free tools. And this is part of the space that probably futures occupies. You can tell us a little bit about the landscape because there's other tools that are out there. For example, the World Resources Institute has a tool called Aqueduct. There's a coastal risk screening tool. So given that these other tools were out there, why did you decide the world needs another tool? And how is probable futures tools a little bit different? When we were developing probable futures, the ones that did exist were largely focused on sea level rise and flooding, which have gotten a lot of attention in terms of climate impacts. Rightly so, but they are not the only climate impacts that we are going to have to deal with. And in fact, climate impacts like heat and like drought, heat in particular are going to impact communities much beyond coastal communities. So heat and changing temperatures is something that's going to impact literally every community, every place on earth. And so we wanted to develop a tool that that focused on kind of those land-based climate variables that really hadn't been well explored, but that there is really good science that backs that up. So at the time when we are developing probable futures, there was also a kind of a for-profit industry of climate intelligence service providers that were cropping up to kind of package and sell this data to communities that could afford it along with consulting services. And we will certainly need those kinds of services. But we felt that there needed to be a resource that everyone had access to that really served as a standard for this is the best that climate science can give us on what the future may look like. And we thought it needed to be available to everyone for free so that not just the biggest banks could afford it or the wealthiest cities could afford it, but that communities all over the world that may not have the resources to pay for for-profit service could access and use it. But also so the individual who's thinking about where they're going to retire or where they're going to put their life savings and to buy in a house so that those people had access to this information as well. And the other thing is about the models themselves, which is there's a lot more uncertainty about sea level rise than there is about weather, about temperature for example. The models understand the physics of the atmosphere quite well. And so temperature outcomes are quite reliable from these models. The track record is really good both globally and locally. But there's a lot of uncertainty as you can see by the news like when will this ice sheet fall off or what is the trajectory for this glacier? And so the direction of travel for the ocean is clear, but there's much more uncertainty about when, how fast, et cetera. The second part is that the decision set around what you can do about a rising ocean is pretty small. You're not going to fight the ocean a little bit before you give up. Whereas how you adapt to even moderately different temperatures, we were talking earlier about skiing. If you're on the wrong side of freezing, it's a really big deal. It's not like the ocean moving exactly, but if you're getting rain instead of snow, that's a really big deal for some communities and for some systems. And so temperature, the models do so well. It makes sense to put that out in a way that everybody can use it. And it is the foundation even for the sea level rise. So understanding temperature first and then the variables that build on top of that felt like really foundational knowledge. Some of the indicators and the tools that you offer include things like temperatures, how many days above 95 degrees or 35 Celsius, are we expecting per year or precipitation in terms of wetness, the flooding story. So what's the likely change in the frequency in these so-called historical one and a hundred year flood or on the dryness side, the change in extended drought or wildfire risks you already mentioned. So a lot of the modeling that your tools display seem to be really based on these two things of temperature and precipitation. Is that right? There's one other thing that really makes probable futures and the resources that we're making distinctive from others. And that's our focus on climate literacy, on building climate literacy. So we thought it was important to not just make this data available and make it available in a way that was really easy to use and really easy to understand, but also pair it with foundational education about climate change itself. I think over the last couple of decades, climate awareness or awareness about climate change has certainly grown. We wanted to give people a fundamental education on climate change itself, the history of the climate, how we have relied on climate stability in the past, how that physical climate is changing and what that may mean for our societies. At climate rising, we often discuss the risks, the policy frameworks, and the strategic shifts required to confront climate change. But what about the success stories already in motion? From NorCal Public Media, an Emmy Award winning journalist Charles Lloyd comes a fighting chance, a new podcast dedicated to the people and industries actively winning the transition. While headlines focus on the cost of climate inaction, a fighting chance documents the return on investment of climate innovation. Scientists revolutionizing our approach to forests, oil workers securing funds for a green transition and many others. 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Join host Tayyah Janet as she takes a deep dive into these topics, featuring insights from experts, and uplifting the lived experiences, wins and struggles of local communities. Listen to the Climate Dispatch at sc.org/climatedispatch, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) Back to this five step process and the manager who's thinking through how do I think about adaptation for my organization or perhaps if I'm a government person from the geography that I govern. So step one, scope the analysis, thinking about locations and duration, step two, using these tools like the problem future maps or the other tools, thinking about the physical risks that will befall these locations over these timescales that we care about. And then we get to step three, which is brainstorming the second and third order risks. So tell us a little bit about how you imagine managers addressing this third step. - It's partly why we're doing this work with you is to flesh that out because what we find is that when we're invited to speak to an audience or to participate in a partnership of some kind with the corporation or a government, the first step to them, this sort of just thinking about this topic, not as carbon emissions or something else is jarring or surprising, but then they get it. And then the second part is, okay, I can now get, like heat matters here, rain matters here. And then the third part is sort of, who's job is this? Like, who does this? Like is this us? Does the government do that? And so we think about this next step of the scoping is probably getting some people together in a room and having a conversation. And one of the things, one of the reasons we make this description sort of general is many organizations now have a sustainability department or office or initiative. It often isn't the greatest fit there. It might fit better in facilities or finance or some other part of the firm or there might need to be some new infrastructure. So I'll give this example from a real interaction with a bank that consulted with us, which was that when we first talked to them, all of their sustainability work reported to the director of reputational risk. And so it was an outward facing part PR and part compliance function. And then after this, we should probably take this to the chief risk officer. This should probably be in the chief risk officers purview, not in the reputational sub portion of the organization. And so that's generally the step three is like, who's in the room? Who's part of this discussion, both for collecting information, but also starting to ask questions. OK, we got some maps, we've got some properties. Now, what's this process look like? Yes, so Allison, you had mentioned, for example, people think about Disney World in Florida as a geographic part of their identity, even though of course there's other Disney theme parks around the world. But if you're a Disney or another tourist-oriented company in Orlando or in Miami, Florida, these second and third-order risks, once you use the map and you see, oh, it's going to get this hot. And the wet bulb temperatures are going to result in this many more days of potentially dangerous hours to be outside. The second-order piece is like, oh, that could affect, for example, whether our customers want to spend their time outdoors from perhaps 10 AM to 3 PM. And if your business is around enjoying the sunshine, either at the coast or inland, that may cause you to rethink what actual business can we be in in 20 or 30 years. So that's, I think, the part of that second-order step. That's the kind of thinking we want people to do. What will those physical changes mean for human health? What will it mean for the natural environment? What will it mean for the built environment? Is it going to melt infrastructure? Certain temperatures going to melt your infrastructure. And if we move on to the third order, well, then we can say, OK, well, what happens if our infrastructure is starting to break down? What does that mean in terms of our maintenance budget? What does that mean in terms of-- do we have to build new facilities and bring a lot more of our experience indoors? Should we start advertising and pushing families to come at different times of the year instead of in summertime, which is when most people have lots of vacation and visit Disney World? So the third order is then saying, OK, well, what next? What are the ripple effects of those second-order risks? Yeah, so I used to live in Singapore and one of the ways I discovered people keep cool there is in some areas, you'll see this mist coming down on you as you walk in or out of a store as a way to help you stay cool. So if one imagines Disney and other theme parks in Florida, installing all these mistors to keep people cool, all of a sudden, if you think, well, what's our water supply availability to do that? And by the way, all that takes electricity. We're going to do that or we're going to start building more indoor opportunities with required cooling. Can the grid afford that? Can not only the connectivity of the distribution and transmission lines, but also do we have enough just power generation? So I think that's also sort of third-order thinking in this regard. Yeah, one of the interesting things that comes out of this process is just realizing how much we are getting for free from the climate. If you think about Disney, for example, or you think about agriculture, for example, we have the perfect temperatures for that particular crop in that particular place. And the rain falls at just the right times because we've designed it that way. And so can we adapt to some of these things and create infrastructure that makes up for those changes? Yes, we can. They are going to cost much more than they have in the past. Yeah, one of the things that we, when we first started doing this work was seeing these patterns, understanding them for ourselves and being kind of amazed by them. We did a little case study of Iowa. And my wife actually grew up in Iowa. I had sort of affinity for Iowa. And what we then saw was the seasonal rain pattern in Iowa is basically perfect or used to be. So it rains more in the spring. And then it tapers off as the plants get taller. So by the end of the summer, there's basically no rain historically. So the rain arrived exactly when you would want rain for growing the nascent stalks, but then tapers off so that you can then harvest in a dry field. And so you have these patterns that where there was the most productive agriculture, it wasn't just the right temperature. It was also these other patterns that some of them are time-based, some of them are, in other ways, more intricate. And we've incorporated those patterns into all kinds of things like where we grow what. And so we see those throughout. And undoing those consciously, people are already doing this unconsciously, but mostly in response to things. I like as an example, the Texas baseball team built a brand new stadium not that long ago. And then it kept getting warmer in Dallas or Fort Worth where it is. And so they had to build a brand-- they decided to build another brand new stadium long before the stadium was obsolete, because people just didn't want to go to baseball games. So now they have an indoor stadium that has a translucent roof and where it's always 72 degrees inside. And maybe they don't regret that decision, but there was a lot of capital spent not that long ago on a stadium that was not yet obsolete in any means. But for climate reasons had become obsolete. And so there's a bunch of stuff we're doing after the fact now that we don't recognize as part of this process, but is a reflection of this. We've already bled into step four, which is assessing your organization's vulnerability to these risks when we think about, oh, maybe our customers will not want to spend the time with us as they do. In the Disney example and in the baseball example, like how do we think about that? And then step five is managing your risk. And your example is a good one where they said, well, we're going to invest a whole lot of capital to try and avoid the discomfort of sitting in a 100 degree baseball game on a Saturday afternoon by essentially sealing it in and spending a lot more capital to do it. But broadly, as we've been thinking about this, options could include accepting risks and keeping an eye on it. Or trying to reduce the risk, risk is often thought of as the product of how likely is it to occur and how bad would it be if it does occur. And you can take steps in either of these directions, reducing likelihood by relocating your operations, changing a supplier from a risk-prone place to a less risk-prone place. And the magnitude that go to example that I think we've discussed is sort of hardening your infrastructure. So yes, wildfire will still come through, but we're going to have enough infrastructure in our buildings to allow us to persevere, maybe the same thing with flooding. And then finally, the other option we've talked about is transferring risk, whether that be by selling assets and then leasing back from the new owner who now bears the risk of these problems or by trying to acquire insurance, again, paying something now so that should it arise, it's on their back rather than yours. So this is sort of the set of opportunities. Are these the types of options that you've been talking through with organizations as they come to you to ask you for support? And some of this, as we just said, is making them aware that that maybe they're already doing this. And so it now has a different context than it might have had before. A good example of that is in insurance, the main fear in the past was arson, basically, for property insurance. Was that people would purposely abuse the insurance by burning down their building. And so one of the interesting things about insurance policies is that they compel you to build the same thing in the same place after it's destroyed or after it's damaged. Because if you didn't like your building, you might be tempted to burn it down and then build something new with the money. So to reduce the fear of arson, they say, no, no, if you put your place burns down, you have to rebuild the same thing. You don't get this sort of easy way out. But that's often now a bad policy. It's counterintuitive in many ways, but also even says, even if I want to rebuild in this same place, I probably want to build aware of this risk. And so we have had numerous conversations with disaster relief organizations and refugee organizations who their prior belief was, we're going to reinstate back to what it was. So after a flood, we're going to rebuild in the same place the same way as a statement of confidence, as a statement of continuity. And they didn't realize what they were doing was actually re-exposing people to new risks that are higher than they used to be. And so this mentality can be very useful with organizations that were in the sort of after the fact-- they thought of themselves only as reacting. They're now actually planning. They now understand that if you just rebuild, you're implying past stability. But instead, if you say, oh, now I can a, anticipate where problems might happen, and b, when they happen, respond to that problem in a way that's informed by the change in risks. Those have been some of the most productive and really gratifying relationships we've had. Yeah, that brings us all the way back to the stability assumption that we talked about a while ago. Yeah, I'd also highlight this idea of both assessing the probability of a climate event of happening, but then also assessing the sensitivity and the vulnerability of a particular place or a particular business to that. I would say another way that probable futures is distinct is that we have decided not to turn the climate data into risk scores for particular places. And that's something that some people will, when they approach us, will say, can't you just give us a risk score if it seems like heat is going up a lot here. Then it's a high score. And if it's not that much, then it's a low score. Well, that's not actually the way that it works, because that place in particular may be prepared for that heat risk. And then another place, even though it seems like the heat won't be as extreme, they just may not be prepared for that. They may not have the transmission lines that are made for those temperatures. So that's why this climate literacy aspect of it is really important. We can't just turn it into a score that it's really more complex than that. And it's about preparedness. So that vulnerability assessment part of it is really important, and that's why we can't just distill it down to, is the climate risk going up? And if so, let's retreat. Right, it's very context-specific. I think on the east coast of the US, you see this also with snow, right? The idea of doubling the number of snow days in Maine from, say, 15 to 30 in a season compared to, say, in Washington DC from 0 to 2. The main people would absorb that, because they've got the infrastructure. So many people have trucks that they can pull out and help. And in DC, the whole city shuts down when there's a bit of snow or sleep, because they're just not used to it. So they're adding two days versus adding 15 days. Well, it seems like the 15 days is way worse. But in fact, it's really, as you're noting, context-specific. To follow on that, one of the things that's going to happen that is already underway in New England, and the eastern part of the United States, is more, more municipalities, more cities will choose to be like DC, because their number of snow days is going to be so low that they will say, we're not going to have a snow infrastructure. It doesn't make sense to maintain a snowplow infrastructure for 365 days. If it's only going to snow a couple times, let's just accept that those two days, we're not going to do much. Those are work from home, and school is canceled for less snow than seemed reasonable in the past. But if it's only going to snow very, very infrequently, having all of these trucks and all of this salt and all of these people on call all the time, it may be better to just accept that occasionally, we're going to deal badly with snow, but most of the time, we're going to save a lot of money on this. And actually, that's a feature of the climate. It's very important that climate change makes the tails fatter. So in a place along the eastern seaboard, the probability of a big blizzard has gone down less than the probability of a mild snowstorm. The mild snowfall of an inch or two is now rain or doesn't fall. But the extreme that comes either from polar air shifting down or something funky happening in the ocean, that tail didn't get smaller. Let's round out our conversation by talking a little more about the organization that you both work for, because we've been talking about adaptation in this five step process more broadly. We've been feeding in some examples of how probable futures can support decision making along these steps. Let's go back to the organization and its strategy. Who are its target users? Who would you say is your market? While our digital climate educational tools are really meant for everyone everywhere, Spencer and I spend a lot of our time focusing on three different audiences. One is business, one is social sector, so government and NGOs, and the third is entertainment, actually, with business leaders. We spend time with CEOs and other kinds of corporations. We within the social sector, we spend a lot of time with NGOs, sometimes disaster risk organizations, or educational NGOs, sometimes elected officials. And then in the entertainment industry, we think it's really important now that there's climate storytelling happening in Hollywood and in novels that they have the literacy and the scientific resources that they need to be able to tell science-based stories. We think this is really important, because again, going back to the idea that we're in a new paradigm, we used to have climate stability. Now we don't-- we need to figure out how to live in that world. And our cultural storytellers in Hollywood and entertainment can help us with that, can help us envision a future where we live in a changing climate, and we work to avoid the worst outcomes, but explore how we can still live well in that environment. So we were consulted behind the scenes about a movie that got a lot of press not that long ago, and the only guidance we offered was, please don't make an asteroid movie. And it's a good asteroid movie. I'm fine with the asteroid movie, but we need movies not about climate change, but they can be rom-coms or dramas or political thrillers. But they acknowledge that this is happening in that context. Telling a coming-of-age story of a young person now and leaving climate change out of it is science fiction. It's in those kids' awareness. And so having that kind of theme just as a fiber even, just as a thread in a story can really help society, but also help the stories be better. That's in industry, and we're all storytellers. One of the good things thus far has been we haven't had to do much marketing. I had a reputation in enough circles to get invitations, and people knew what I was up to, what I was doing was distinctive enough that we got interesting invitations into different organizations. Notably, we've done quite a lot of work with McKinsey. McKinsey asked us to come in and help them understand how climate change might affect the world, and that's been on terms that are non-commercial. So the terms we have are that we work pro bono, exclusively with the intention and a commitment on the other party's side to make what we do together public in some way. So it doesn't bear our imprint necessarily, but our information is used by them in a way that winds up being a public good in some way. We've had a network of invitations to do that. Most organizations, most communities, are just at the beginning of thinking about this. So most of our work now is still at that incipient stage. Part of why we're working with you on this work at HBS, part of the reason for me to join HBS's fellow is to try to help people get to that next step or along that process. And that's why we're happy to be on the podcast, happy to get it out in the world because how this gets internalized in other places isn't for us to tell people, but we're hoping to give them enough guidance, enough of a framework and enough information that they can take it. And so far, very few organizations have really embarked on that path. And so we're hopeful that the next phase of our work will be twofold. One is undershaping that, helping people shape that. But the other is accumulating people's stories. So actually one open request to the listening audience is you can. right to [email protected]. We're very happy to be a repository of examples where people, organizations, communities have taken some process, doesn't need to be ours, but addressed climate resilience and adaptation in a way that others could learn from. And I'll give a counter example that I encountered not that long ago, was I was invited to speak at a convening. The person who came after me talked about how they wanted to own Boston real estate as part of their portfolio. And so they found a property. And then after finding the property, they hired a climate risk consultancy. And the climate risk consultancy told them, "This place is going to flood for sure." And the whole neighborhood around it will flood. And so this person in this conference said, "We're so proud of what we did," which was, "We bought the land." And then we built a building that has basically no first floor. And so there's no assets below 20 feet up. And the parking garage down below has a drawbridge, basically. So you can seal it. And so we've used climate information to make our property totally climate proof. And I look at it and think, "But your whole neighborhood will be underwater." That kind of application, there's an industry for that right now, of like how to make your fortress hardened so that you're protected. But it's not very wise. It's not very expansive. And it doesn't think through, that's why we talk about this third order effect. It's like, "Well, people really want to live there. Who will deliver your food? Does this building come with a supply of canned goods in some way?" So, Allison, what's next for the organization? What's next is, first of all, on our online climate literacy resources, we will be continually adding and updating those resources. So one of the things that's really important philosophically to us as an organization, and that we think needs to come more into culture is a culture of maintenance and taking care of things over the long term. The internet is littered with projects that someone put up once and was really cool and then they never maintained and never kept up. We certainly do not intend to do that. We will continually improve and update our resources. That's one thing in particular that we plan to add to the maps are extreme maps. If you click on a sell and probable futures you see a range, that's the fifth percentile to the 95th percentile. But we've learned that when you give people the fifth and 95th percentile, they think that's the extremes. And for most people, that's a lot. But 10% of the time is outside those tales. 10% is a lot. And so we'll do some more work at the extremes because the extreme events we've seen in lots of places are within the distribution of our data. And stuff that's like a 2% chance, well, it's actually pretty likely over time. That's enough to be worth thinking about. So the two other things coming up for probable futures is our speaking engagements. So we have developed a pretty active calendar of speaking engagements, whether they be large conferences or in private settings with corporate leaders or elected officials. We have found those speaking engagements to be a very effective way of developing climate literacy in a short period of time with people who have a lot of responsibility. And then the third thing is thought leadership on adaptation and resiliency that we really continue to see a need for more exploration on that front. So we'll be showing up our resources to publish a more thought leadership on adaptation and resiliency. And in particular, that means finding examples of communities and organizations who are really thinking critically about adaptation and resiliency and making decisions around it and sharing those stories so that we can get people's imaginations going about what adaptation resiliency might look like in their community. Let's pivot to my last question, which is for career advice because a lot of our listeners are thinking about getting into the space of business and climate change and are seeking guidance and advice. So I wonder if you can each provide some insights on maybe how you answer that question. I'm sure you get approached all the time. Allison, start with you. I would say you don't necessarily have to leave your job to work on climate change. Climate is going to intersect with every aspect of life. We need to bring an awareness of it into every industry and every role really. So first, think about how climate intersects with the work, and that is likely the best place to start. That is certainly how Spencer and I both came into this space was by bringing the skills and the tools that we had from working in other disciplines and adding climate to it. And I have a quick answer for three groups. So first is actually for students, not about their career, but as students, start asking your faculty, "Well, how does climate matter for this?" Whatever it is you're talking about, ask your econ professors when they're teaching you about business cycles, what role climate plays in it. So just asking your history, philosophy, literature professors to think about this. You can be very effective in getting them to think about it. The second is for experts. So you could think about this as college faculty, but any expert. Bringing some climate literacy into your work doesn't require you to go back to grad school or to get some new certificate. It turns out you can have pretty basic literacy by spending a few hours on problemfutures.org. And we built that because a basic understanding is really powerful and you can do it. And so I wish there were a little bit of education for all the people who are experts in some domain. And then the last part is for leaders, and that is simple, which is bring young people into your decision-making process. So I tell C-suite people that if they're bored, it's all old people. They're probably not going to be able to help them as much with climate as they should be able to. And so putting in senior places, young people, and a little proxy for this, as I say, if you're making a big decision and no one in the room is under 40, you're probably making a bad decision. So bringing young people who, for whom these consequences are very different, but also who don't have the baggage of, "Oh, I should have done this before," or in some way, "I've already screwed up," or "It's late for me," or "It's hard." But so my career advice to people who are late in their career is bring in young people, because they'll bring this awareness with them much more so. Well, on those words, Spencer Allison, thank you both so much for joining us here on Climate Rising. Thank you, Mike, and thanks for your partnership. Yes, thanks, Mike. That was my conversation with Spencer Glendon and Allison Smart from "Probable Futures." You've been listening to Climate Rising. To hear more episodes, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Share with your friends, and don't forget to rate and review. For show notes, head over to climaterising.org or click on this episode. I'm your host, Mike Toffold. Alley Thorns, our producer, and Craig McDonald's, our audio engineer. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Climate Rising. See you then.