Climate Choices Research and System Plan Released by ChoiceFlows to Support Main Street Climate Decision Making

RESEARCH TRIANGLE REGION, N.C., Oct. 28, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ChoiceFlows Inc. (Choiceflows) today released an architecture for research and a system to help small and medium businesses (SMB) and individual households (IH) to make thoughtful climate choices.

Small and medium size businesses (SMB) and individual households (IH) struggle to understand their role in a changing climate. SMB/IH interest is rising for actions they can take to both be responsible and attract customers with visible climate choices. 

During the first half of 2021 Choiceflows successfully conducted choice research and built with a consortium of research and technology partners an online system – smartwa.us – to help small and medium sized businesses (SMB) make better decisions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Based on this experience, Choiceflows now proposes to conduct research and build an online system for Climate Choices at an SMB and individual level.

The Smart WA online system brings together and updates daily hundreds of data points about health, economic, and quality of life that have never been in one place before. For the small business owner or operator, Smart WA simplifies finding what you need to know to make a COVID-related decision, such as customer capacity, masking, vaccination of employees or proof of vaccination or testing by customers.

The underlying metaphor for use of Smart WA is an online weather report and forecasting service – with the report and forecast in this case being community health, economic health, and quality of life indicators – rather than temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure.

Similarly, lots of climate change data is available and robust, yet not in a single and convenient place for time-starved businesses and interested individuals to make choices and informed decisions.

The metaphor for the proposed online Climate Choices (Smart-CC) system is a weight loss program. "Weight is a carbon and resource footprint, and loss is the result of reduction in consumption of energy or resources, and where "exercise" is the positive addition of carbon offsets (example: planting trees).

Choiceflows uses different types of choice experiments and will test a wide variety of attributes to build and deploy "what-if" simulators (decision support systems, or DSSs) to make informed Climate Choices. The DSS will include lowering energy and resource consumption and the associated resulting lower costs of doing business. In the case of attractiveness for customers, which choices businesses can make and how this will increase choices for customers – as well as loyalty and potentially support price increases if properly communicated.

What on the surface seems insurmountable in the context of climate can be broken down into SMB/IH actions one attribute at a time that add up to large-scale system resilience.

Choiceflows proposes to deliver continuous value in stages over the life of this approach and system. Each stage is designed to deliver immediate insights or value that are both independently and cumulatively useful.

Smart-CC will be powered by Tanjo machine learning, a team of world-class machine learning and data scientists. Tanjo currently powers the Smart WA online system for COVID.

Choiceflows choice experiments and revealed preference data will provide the basis for embodied results in a machine learning system, and will make social science, cultural normative behaviors and economic insights available in actionable and immediately available forms for government and main street business decision makers.

Choiceflows is initially self-funding this initiative with work underway to secure additional support for development of this system from federal, state, and local governments and by interested industry partners sensitive to the risks of climate change.

Contact: Frank Ethridge
919-357-4452

SOURCE ChoiceFlows Inc.