3DL brings communities together to make and implement a plan for living in a hotter future.

Its getting hotter, fast. In 2023, the earth’s temperature breached the 1.5 degree “point of no return” increase. Within the century, it is predicted to rise by as much as three degrees. Whether your community is a coastal metropolis, a small mountain ski-town, or a rural farm region, your landscape will not be what it is today. Where can your community thoughtfully and pragmatically understand the coming realities and not only make, but implement, a long-term, comprehensive plan? And when so much of it feels beyond our power, where is your agency?

3DL provides that space. A 501(c)3 non-profit firm, we offer a new type of planning consultancy that connects you to a new type of power, what we call connectivity power, to determine your future.

We used to associate the power to determine our future with independence. A single sector of a community would hire a consulting firm to spend a few months formulating the right plan, with relatively short-term fixes that they could independently employ to determine their geographic, political, and economic future. But with climate change, there’s no independence, no “getting it right.” The future of any community depends on the decisions of every other community around the world. Climate change is too complex, knows no geographic, political, or economic boundaries, and has too many unknowns to maintain any independent sense of power to determine the future. So is your community powerless?

Quite the contrary. Climate change has revealed a new understanding of power - what we call connectivity power. Your community’s real power resides in your ability to connect your residents to one another, to the world, and to complex reality. 3DL helps you connect your community’s power to determine your future.

We connect you to one another.

Effective community decision-making ultimately requires participation of the three classical realms of society: the political, the techno-economic, and the cultural. Yet consulting rarely if ever engages all three. 3DL ensures all three are at every decision-making forum.

Further, consultants spend months researching and evaluating a community, write up a brilliant plan, and then wash their hands and leave. Even the best plans end up as door jams because nobody built the political will to implement them. 3DL spends years building the community trust and political will necessary to make and implement a plan, and we stay with you to make sure it is implemented effectively. That can only happen in the end if at the beginning the process includes people across realm, across sector, and across demographic. This is known as a “whole of society approach.”

We connect you to the world.

Climate change is a globally complex challenge over which no community has power in isolation to determine their future. We connect your community to a global network, the world’s first cross-pollinated decisionmaking infrastructure. Your community is directly partnered with 2+ sister communities, e.g. based on shared climate vulnerability, and — yes, this will seem shocking — representatives from your local community council will serve and have voting power in theirs, and vice versa. This structures interconnectedness in decision-making to match the interconnectedness in climate, giving you not less but more power.

We connect you to complex reality.

Other consultants believe their job is to give you the right answers. But anyone who pretends to have the answer to climate change is trying to make a fool of themself — or of you. The truth is, we don’t know what is coming, and we have to build the courage together to step into the unknown. To do that, we have to work through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and hope. Until a community can move past denial and anger about the future, they can’t begin to make plans for it. And, yet, when does our public decision-making process in any sector provide avenues to work through that?

3DL connects your community with climate scientists, digital twins, and future scenario simulations to fully understand the coming changes in a three-degree hotter world. It shepherds you through the accompanying grief, past denial in its various forms (heads in the sand, quick fixes, silver bullets), appropriate and misplaced anger, and onwards with maturity and curiosity to accept change and decide your future with pragmatic hope.

3DL helps you connect to the future you want.