"It Will Change the Way You Think About Planning for Your Future."
Learn how to find your path through the chaos.
This season’s Personal Climate Strategy Workshop starts this Thursday. I thought you might be interested in hearing what we’re up to.
Build a personal strategy for a time of systemic disruption.
We have entered a new era of instability — ecological, economic, political, and institutional — but most of us are still trying to plan our lives with old tools from a more stable past.
This Workshop offers you the tools you need today. It is not a lecture about climate science, lifestyle changes, or political activism. Instead, it trains you in using a proven system for building a rugged decision-making framework ready for times of increasing stress and disruption.
In eight live sessions, you’ll learn a step-by-step process for getting clear-headed, prepared and effective as systems destabilize. You’ll leave with a personal climate strategy to guide you through the coming critical life decisions you face.
THE PLANETARY CRISIS HAS SHIFTED GEARS
Over the last few years, we’ve crossed many of the very thresholds climate advocates fought for decades to avoid: global heat records shattering, floods costing billions of dollars, wildfires intensifying, ice sheets breaking up, crops failing, droughts spreading. Many climate impacts are arriving sooner than expected and combining to be worse than forecast.
Society, though, has failed to respond at the same pace. Emissions are still rising. Climate adaptation planning is slow and underfunded. Local governments are overwhelmed. Whole nations are rolling back their climate promises and cutting disaster aid. Economists and business leaders warn that continued delay brings financial instability and risks to the economic futures of whole regions.
Worse still, we see a swelling “brittleness bubble” of overvalued, climate-endangered homes and assets -- a bubble that looks bound to burst.
Of course, we face all this in a time of authoritarian attacks on democracy and geopolitical chaos.
Add it all together, and we are living through the most rapid planetary destabilization humans have ever experienced. Solid advice from ten or twenty years ago is often now simply out of date.
THE PLANETARY CRISIS WILL DEFINE YOUR FUTURE
You know this crisis is real. But most of us have tended to see the planetary crisis as something happening elsewhere, to other people. An issue to track, not a context to reckon with.
Now, the chaos is all around us. It’s the wildfire smoke turning your skies hazy orange, the sudden increase in your insurance premiums, the battered infrastructure and flooded roads that turn your commute into a gamble. It’s your retirement investments taking a climate hit. Your kids seeking reassurance and guidance. Your community struggling to recover after heavy weather.
The climate crisis is not an issue, we find, but an era.
And this is only the beginning. We thought we had time. We’re discovering we don’t — that later is too late.
YOUR FUTURE IS NOW YOUR RESPONSIBILITY
We’re all now on a collision course with planetary reality.
We’re not heading into a linear, manageable transition. We’re facing cascading failures, converging disasters, and compounding brittleness risks. We’re in a discontinuity, and past expertise and experience are poor guides to what’s coming. No one is as ready as they should be.
You can’t count on governments (or advocacy groups or churches or charities or anyone else around you) to protect your home, defend the systems you depend on and secure your future. You’ll need to act before bold government rescue plans, or climate-adaptation megaprojects, or large-scale supported relocation programs get up and running — because in many places, they may never come.
If you want to be ready, you have to make yourself ready, and time is not on your side.
YOU FACE FIERCE COMPETITION FOR THE FUTURE YOU WANT
This crisis will be life-changing for many millions of us.
As this fact grows obvious and undeniable, more and more people are scrambling for security, for safer places and sturdier communities.
Place is at the center of personal climate strategies. Where we plant ourselves as the chaos intensifies is one of the most important questions of our lifetimes.
Nowhere is completely safe and no system is completely stable, but some are a lot safer and more stable than others. In relatively safe places, we can build the foundations for successful and relatively secure lives; in the more brittle, vulnerable places, we’re in for an extremely hard future.
Here’s the harsh truth, though: there’s not enough relative safety to go around.
Nowhere on Earth are we doing enough to ruggedize more places for climate chaos, or grow at the necessary scales in the places that are relatively safe. We face a closing climate relocation bottleneck, as more and more worried people scramble for a shrinking supply of places that can offer a durable future.
Not everyone will get the future they deserve.
SUCCESS DEMANDS A STRATEGY
To get the future you deserve, you need a strategy.
Specifically, you need a life strategy for making smart choices in unprecedented circumstances — what I call a personal climate strategy.
The discontinues of climate chaos will impact every aspect of your life: your family’s security and health; your career and household finances; your community and civic life; your investments and retirement planning.
And, of course, each of us has unique circumstances and different goals. There is no one-size-fits-all best answer.
A good strategy will prepare you to:
Care for yourself and your loved ones.
Honor your values and help those who depend on you.
Support healthy and sensible decision-making.
Navigate cascading risks, identify relative safety, and ruggedize your life.
Plant the future you’re working for on solid ground.
Thrive in the process, with a grounded approach to tough times.
The cornerstone of all good personal climate strategies is personal ruggedization.
That means making smart decisions about where we choose to live, the systems we embed ourselves in, and the ways we work with others to improve our odds of a good future.
It’s intelligent, purpose-driven engagement with deep uncertainties. It’s how we build ourselves a home on a planet none of us have ever seen before.
Personal ruggedization isn’t about buying more guns, bugging out or bunkering down. Instead, it focuses on serving what matters most to us, using reality-based strategies that grow more options, resilience, and social connection.
The good news? You can learn how to build a strategy based on personal ruggedization. Now’s your chance.
I TEACH PERSONAL CLIMATE STRATEGIES
I began teaching personal climate strategy courses five years ago. Everywhere I went, I met people asking what they could do in their own lives for their own families, now that a massive climate crisis was unavoidable. At conferences, in emails from readers of my newsletters, even at the neighborhood barbecue, people took me aside and asked me what advice I could give them.
I’d been providing bespoke individual consultations for years, so I was familiar with the kinds of questions people have about their futures now. I also knew that I could use my 30 years of experience working at the forefront of the planetary crisis to help people prepare for what’s coming... to build a framework for individual climate foresight.
Climate foresight is my job. I’ve framed insights used by innovative companies, governments, and foundations around the world. I’ve written extensively about the planetary crisis, sustainability solutions and climate strategies. I created the best-selling book Worldchanging. I’ve presented my thinking at the United Nations, dozens of leading universities and major conferences, including to TED Global talks viewed more than 4 million times.
Now, I’ve taken what I understand about climate foresight and discontinuous systems change, and created a step-by-step approach to understanding the wild future ahead, and finding our place in it. I’ve designed this Workshop to walk participants through that system for building personal climate strategies, offering some of the best actionable climate foresight in the world at a fraction of the cost of buying individual advice from corporate consultants.
I’m grateful and honored that since that first course, more than 500 amazing individuals from around the world have worked with me to build their own climate strategies.
THE BOTTOM LINE: THIS WORKSHOP WORKS
My eight-class personal climate strategy workshop — the only one of its kind — is your opportunity to work directly with me. Together, we’ll build the foundation for your personal climate strategy.
You’ll learn how to anchor the life you’ve built —your career, your family, your goals — on ground that can stand firm in the storms ahead and position you for success.
Imagine being able to:
• Stop doom-looping and focus your energy on what (and who) matters most.
• Understand the key forces shaping your risks — the patterns behind the chaos.
• Use foresight tools to assess and be prepared for future disruptions.
• Make decisions grounded in clarity, prudence, informed intuition, and measured optimism, not panic.
• Build a personal roadmap for smart, timely action that works for you, and become part of a network of people who are working through the same challenges.
Whether you’re preparing to relocate, climate-proofing your retirement, ruggedizing your home, pivoting your business, or simply trying to get ahead of the curve, you’ll come away with a robust strategy, tailored to your needs.
That strategy is designed not just to protect you, but to preserve your ability to support others and contribute meaningfully as conditions change.
WHAT YOU’LL GET IN THIS WORKSHOP:
Eight in-depth talks delivered live by Alex Steffen, followed by a brief small group discussion and Q&A. Each session runs for approximately 75 minutes.
Breakthrough frameworks for creating big-picture clarity, not false certainty.
Personal Climate Strategy prompts to guide reflection.
Curated readings and essential resource guide.
Invitation to the Personal Climate Exploration Group (an alumni-only working group).
Access to expert consulting (50% off).
Access to class recordings, and to future updates to course materials.
If this sounds like a workshop that meets your needs, check it out: The Personal Climate Strategy Workshop.