Radically imagining and co-creating climate just futures
Who we are
The Climateverse Futures Lab is a strategic foresight and climate storytelling studio. We help organizations and teams anticipate change, engage meaningfully with climate and justice issues, and turn vision into action.
We believe in harnessing strategic foresight, sustainability principles, and storytelling to drive impactful change within organizations and communities.
what we do
We help organizations move beyond short-term sustainability goals to long-term, transformative change. Our approach integrates strategic foresight, sustainability frameworks, and creative storytelling to equip teams with the tools they need to navigate uncertainty and lead with purpose. Our tailored programs help businesses align sustainability goals with workforce engagement and long-term resilience.
Our core pillars
Climate justice
Climate Justice is the recognition that climate change is a human-made crisis that has primarily been wrought by those with economic power and privilege, while the effects of climate change have a disproportionately negative impact on the historically marginalised and underserved – primarily people of colour and low income communities around the world.
Climate Justice means advancing climate solutions that link human rights and development in a human-centred approach, placing the needs, voices and leadership of those who are most impacted at the forefront.
Climate Justice is a complex, intersectional issue that is woven deeply into economies, cultures, and the natural world. For this reason, businesses must approach the complex and intersectional opportunities and challenges of Climate Justice with a multi-dimensional and systems-thinking lens.
futures & foresight
Futures Literacy is the capability of imagining diverse and multiple futures, and using futures as lenses through which we look at the present anew.
Futures thinking refers to systematic strategies for thinking about the future, from facilitation methods to trend analysis to pattern-making and scenario development.
Foresight refers to applying specific tools/methods for conducting future work.
Strategic foresight is not about predicting a single future. It is about the analysis of plausible futures, which can support better policy making. Rather than making predictions based on linear extrapolation of past and current trends, foresight cultivates the capacity to anticipate alternative futures and an ability to imagine multiple and non-linear possible consequences.
art & storytelling
When envisioning possible futures, storytelling is a powerful way to make those futures real and tangible.
At the root of the challenge with big issues like climate justice, sustainability and long-term thinking are the stories we tell ourselves, about the future, about humanity and about what’s possible.
Our storytelling serves to challenge mainstream narratives of apocalypse, not to platform utopia, but to tell a different story about how we chart the way forward through this polycrisis. To help us all to believe that we can in fact operate differently, with each other and with the Earth.
Both our productions and client engagements utilize storytelling in different ways, to help participants “experience” the futures they envision, and take our learnings from there to make them real IRL.
Climate Justice
+
Futures & Foresight
+
Storytelling
=
better futures
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Climate Justice + Futures & Foresight + Storytelling = better futures |
meet our founder
Alicia Richins
Alicia (she/they) is a climate justice advocate, sustainable impact strategist, and writer driven to imagine beyond the plausible.
As the founder of The Climateverse, they harness storytelling and futures methods to inspire action toward just and sustainable futures.
With nearly a decade of facilitation experience and five years in consulting, Alicia helps organizations and community groups develop futures-oriented impact strategies that navigate the intersections of climate, social, and economic justice. Through their work, they guide teams in unpacking complex challenges while building actionable pathways toward their desired futures.
A proud Trinbagonian-Canadian, their approach is shaped by deep engagement in the youth climate movement across Canada and the Caribbean, alongside graduate studies in ecological economics, international development, and urban planning. Their work is further enriched by ongoing education in strategic foresight, sustainability, and systems change.
start your journey into the climateverse
Recent Features
GREEN MAJORITY RADIO INTERVIEW
September 2024
Our founder, Alicia Richins, was interviewed as part of a segment on the Green Majority Radio show to share about her recent experiences bringing The Climateverse to New York for the UN Summit of the Future and Climate Week.
futures hub podcast interview
July 2024
Alicia was interviewed on the Futures Hub podcast to talk all about The Climateverse, from origins to ultimate visions and our core Why.
solidarity & acknowledgement
We are grateful to operate out of Tkaronto, “the place in the water where the trees reside” and traditional home to the Anishnabeg Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Huron-Wendat and Chippewa peoples.
We honour the Dish with one Spoon wampum belt covenant that predates colonization, and calls on those who share these lands to peaceably share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.
We also recognize that wherever you come across a production or engagement of The Climateverse, that North of us, South of us, East of us and West of us is and always will be Indigenous land.