Decision intelligence for climate

The world keeps learning. Our decisions should keep up.

Over $2 trillion a year now flows into climate solutions — on evidence that keeps moving underneath it. ClimateSolve keeps every decision connected to the evidence behind it, so when something changes we know exactly which decisions it reaches.

For people who allocate climate capital, or advise those who do. Concept stage — occasional notes on what we learn, and first word when there is something real to try.

Decisions shouldn’t become obsolete silently.

A decision gets made properly — the evidence gathered, the case written, the committee satisfied. Then a cost forecast is revised, a policy shifts, a trial fails. The new information is published. It just never finds its way back to the decision that depended on it.

Software solved a version of this long ago: change one component and the build system knows precisely what depends on it. Nothing does that for the decisions an institution has already made.

Evidence Claim Assumption Decision depends on depends on depends on the evidence moves — and the change travels to the decisions resting on it built right to left. has to be asked left to right.
Record that chain once, and a change in the evidence can be traced to the handful of live decisions it actually reaches — and to the many it doesn’t. People still decide; this only makes sure they are deciding on evidence that still holds.

Climate is where this starts. It isn’t where it ends.

A Monday morning email: of your 400 live commitments, three rest on something that changed last week. Here they are, and here is what moved.

We begin with climate because the evidence moves fastest and the decisions are largest. But the same question sits under every field where consequential decisions outlive the evidence behind them — investment theses, clinical guidance, infrastructure business cases, public policy.

And increasingly, decisions made by machines. An AI acts on what is true at the moment it acts. Six months later some of that is wrong, and nobody is asking which of its outstanding decisions should now be reconsidered. It is the same graph, and nobody owns it yet.

Mapping evidence to decisions properly used to need an army of analysts, which is why it was never done. That has only just stopped being true.

Our failures are rarely that nobody knew. Somebody knew — it just never reached the decision.

What we are looking for

One institution. One decision you have already made.

Not a pilot, not a platform rollout. One real allocation that is already on your books — and permission to map the evidence, claims and assumptions it actually rests on.

Then we watch. If something material changes and it genuinely reaches that decision, you will know before your next scheduled review. If nothing does, you will have lost a few conversations and gained a written record of why you decided what you decided.

And if it doesn’t work, we stop and say so. That is the point of starting this small.

The full argument — the mechanism, the boundaries we have set, the risks we think are real and the point at which we would stop — is set out in a short paper: read the concept paper (PDF, 6 pages).

If that sounds like you, write directly — steve@cbmediagroup.com.