What is the future we want?

True risk assessment is not a compliance exercise. Instead, it's a curious inquiry and shared deliberation into what could affect your prospects in a climate-changed world. It is the first step to reducing uncertainty.

The cognitive work of identifying, analysing and evaluating risks and opportunities tends to be under appreciated. Done well, it generates valuable information. It opens a path for leadership and initiative.

Climate models and statistical methods supply only some of the information you need. That critical information must be augmented with qualitative data specific to your context. gramma uses our model of communicative work, counterfactual thinking, and spatial mapping techniques to uncover that essential information.

For consistency with international standards – and to avoid re-inventing the wheel – we use the time horizons and concept of risk in the IPCC's sixth assessment report as the basis of our work on climate risks.

A corporate climate action plan or an adaptation strategy is the key to accountability and building trust, whether that's in communities or investors. For corporate actors, this is how you avoid the risk of greenwashing. For public sector organisations, it's how you maintain and restore trust in government.

Too many climate action plans are detached from the organisation's productive, value-creating work or the particularities of their context, value chains or life cycles. Swap in other branding and it could be anyone's.

Focus tends to be on disclosure, but unless you have carried out a coherent set of planned actions that produce observable changes, you have nothing to disclose. It becomes a communication exercise.

gramma uses a actor-action-target heuristic drawn from the behavioural sciences to specify goals and actions for emissions reduction, adaptation and resilience. This produces the concrete detail needed for effective action and accountability.

All the ways we have of reducing uncertainty involve communicative work: sharing knowledge, building trust and organising action.

gramma's model and practice of communicative work is grounded in the language sciences and an ethics of communication, rather than the transactional and distributional nature of marketing comms and most other practices of communication. It is equal, generative and aims always for epistemic justice.

For those working with and in communities, this model and practice of communication is an antidote to mis- and disinformation – the top global risk of our time and a hazard for any kind of effective action on climate risk.

For public sector organisations, this is how you engage in good faith with citizens, build an appetite for change, and discover critical information for policy and planning.

For organisations and groups of any kind, this is simply how you get things done.