About 40 percent of the US population lives in counties located on a coastline. What will happen to property values along the coast as rising ocean levels and extreme climate events put more and more homes in danger of being flooded?

Do the Paris riots have something to tell us about how to approach climate change? How would your proposed climate change policies and recommendations sit with the 80% who are struggling to get by, if they thought it would make daily life harder, more expensive, etc.?

In 1991, Geoffrey Moore introduced a new term into the discussion of Diffusion of Innovation, particularly with reference to high-tech products. That term was “Crossing the Chasm.” In his book, Crossing the Chasm, updated in a 2014 edition, Moore argues, “There is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.”

Aïda is not just a popular Giuseppe Verdi opera first performed in the 1870s, it’s also the acronym for well known marketer’s model: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, or AIDA. Aïda the opera may worth listening to, but learning more about AIDA the decision-making model may be a better investment of your time.

Most people advocating solutions to climate change are technical or policy types, not marketers. Yet much of what we’re trying to do is to market new approaches to the public at large. Is there something marketers can teach us about how to go about reducing carbon emissions?

Tuesday’s US national elections changed little, except to put the brakes on further efforts by the Trump Administration to deal with climate change, such as by bailing out failing coal and nuclear plants. In many ways, it just replicated the 2010 election, which put the brakes on President Obama’s Administration and set the stage for the 2014 recapture of the Senate by Republicans.

Now that most of us have come to realize that climate change will not be reversed in our lifetimes, we’ve turned to the next new thing: dealing with it. Rather than embracing doomsday scenarios, our remarkable economic system is beginning to realize that there’s real profit in dealing with the potential impacts of climate change. Of course there are potentially real and massive losses in NOT dealing with these same impacts.

Where is climate change heading? We don’t want to be like the Croatian goalie in this World Cup 2018 Final match, heading right when the French kick is going to the left? How can we plan far enough ahead to make sure our water systems will be adequate in a climate-challenged future that’s likely to be much drier in many parts of the U.S.?

With the 17th Greenbuild conference and expo scheduled to be held in Chicago in just two weeks, I thought it would be interesting to look back at the very first such event. This segment is taken from my forthcoming memoir, From Earth Day to Enlightenment: An Eco/Spiritual Odyssey, to be published in the fall of 2019.

If we’re convinced that we “don’t know what we don’t know” about future climate challenges, then one question that pops up right away is: How can we get smarter about planning for resiliency in the face of unknown events?