A lab building audit grade intelligence for climate and nature risk.

The economist Jeremy Rifkin proposes a course correction. We think we inhabit a planet of dry land, when we actually live on a water planet. The hydrosphere animates all life and, under a warming climate, it is destabilizing: floods, droughts, heat waves, wildfires and storms beyond any historical pattern.

The shift he describes is to treat water as a source of life rather than a resource to be controlled, learning to re-adapt to the hydrosphere instead of continuing to adapt it to us. For whoever decides on capital and operations, the question is no longer how much risk to accept, but how to operate inside a system that has lost its stability.

Jeremy Rifkin, Planet Aqua (2024)

The planetary boundaries framework, developed by Johan Rockström and colleagues, describes nine processes that keep the Earth in the stable state in which civilization developed. It is the safe operating space for humanity. Most of these boundaries have already been crossed, among them biosphere integrity, land use, the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and freshwater.

Companies and financial institutions do not operate at the margins of this system. They operate inside it. Value chains, credit portfolios, physical assets and revenue models are exposed to ground that has shifted regime. The risk that emerges is at once environmental, climate and social, and in real life it rarely comes separated. We treat these three dimensions as the variable that reorders the others.

Johan Rockström et al., the planetary boundaries framework

A scientific data point does not arrive ready for a board or credit committee decision. Ecosystem dependencies, social impact, exposure to physical and transition risk all need to be converted into information that audit, regulators and risk teams can read. The TNFD organizes the vocabulary of nature. IFRS S1 and S2 make the climate reading mandatory for companies. And the Central Bank, with its social, environmental and climate risk rule, does the same for the financial system, requiring the three dimensions together.

This is the work of Lagoa. Each conclusion comes with the evidence that supports it and the path linking one to the other, in a form that someone else can reproduce and that survives an audit. We call this audit grade intelligence.

Everything we deliver starts from the same social, environmental and climate risk assessment: physical risk, transition risk, geographic exposure, ecosystem dependencies and social factors, modeled with scenarios and anchored to the source that supports each conclusion.

That foundation feeds different decisions. The same analysis that supports a company’s climate report serves to price the risk of a credit or insurance portfolio. The purpose and the audience change, not the engine.

A walkthrough of the IFRS S1 and S2 gap assessment: Lagoa runs through the set of requirements, flags what is missing and shows the evidence next to each conclusion. Step through it to see the flow.

Evidence at every point. Every conclusion is born linked to the source that supports it and the requirement it answers. The trail exists before anyone asks for it. That is what separates a defensible analysis from a well-formatted opinion.

Reproducible, not opinion-based. The same question leads to the same result, with the logic open to inspection. Where consulting delivers an opinion, Lagoa delivers something you can verify.

Limits stated. We state where the method does not yet reach and what the data does not support. Acknowledging uncertainty is what makes the rest trustworthy.

A team that has scaled before. People who built and ran technology at global scale, now applied to an old risk problem with a method the consulting market had no incentive to create.

Lagoa was founded by Sergio VerdeSelva. Over nearly two decades, he built and scaled technology platforms at large global companies, among them Google, Spotify and DAZN, across Latin America and Europe, in product and operations roles during phases of rapid growth.

The turn toward climate and sustainability came from a concrete unease: looking closely, it became clear that climate, environmental and social risk had stopped being a reputational matter and become a planning variable, and that no one was translating that complexity into something a company, a board or a bank could use and defend. Lagoa was born from that gap. Sergio is a Climatebase Fellow and took part in CVM LEAP, the regulatory innovation environment of the Brazilian Securities Commission.

The experience of scaling technology across different markets is what gives Lagoa the dual reading the problem demands: the rigor of someone who runs product and data at scale, and proximity to the Brazilian regulatory reality.

Part of what we do has no name yet in the Brazilian market. We took part in CVM LEAP, the regulatory innovation environment of the securities commission, and we develop methods of risk assessment and governance that become both product and citable material.

For us, research serves a practical function. It keeps the method honest and puts us at the table with regulators, academia and the market before the category exists.

We look for delivery partners, clients willing to treat climate risk as a decision variable, and people who combine technical rigor with the drive to build what does not yet exist.