Services

What I do

Civitas Systems is built on a single premise: the world's most important problems don't fit inside a single discipline. Underneath the work is one method — provenance-first analysis — applied through a set of capabilities, across two domain clusters. Most engagements draw on three or more capabilities at once.

The premise

I help organizations answer hard, cross-disciplinary questions in climate, sustainability, peace, governance, and international development — and produce analysis that holds up when someone challenges it. It is for teams whose work has to survive assurance, an audit, or public scrutiny. Provenance is the point: every number traceable to its source, every method you can defend.

What that buys

Numbers that survive assurance.

Methods you can cite, not take on trust.

Results someone else can replicate.

Start here · Fixed price

Productized offers

Fixed scope, defined deliverable, a price you can see before we talk. For when the work is well-shaped and the engagement boundary is clear from the start.

Topics

Model Pre-Mortem

1 week $6–10K

An adversarial read of a model or methodology before someone hostile does it — for teams who need failure modes, worst-case misuse, and the disclaimer that needs to be visible found before release.

Review Rehearsal

1 week $6–10K

Your team drilled before a board review, a public comment period, or an assurance audit — the hard questions asked in private first, for anyone about to defend their work in the open.

Methodology Audit

2 weeks $9–15K

A line-by-line review of an existing methodology document, codebase, or model — what is defensible, what is not, and what to fix first — for a team that needs to know where it stands.

Spatial Brief

2 weeks $9–15K

One well-defined geospatial question answered with publication-quality maps and a findings memo — for when you have a specific spatial question and need a clean answer to it.

Network Snapshot

3 weeks $14–25K

A defined dataset turned into a network graph, centrality analysis, and a findings memo on structure and central actors — for teams that need to see who holds a network together.

GHG Inventory Starter Pack

4 weeks $24–40K

A Scope 1+2 inventory with a full provenance pack — every factor traceable to its source, built for third-party assurance — for a company facing a reporting deadline. Under Source · hover or focusCalifornia SB 253 (Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) applies to companies above $1B in revenue doing business in California; the first Scope 1+2 disclosures are due in 2026, with third-party assurance phasing in from 2027..

Independent Replication

4–8 weeks quoted

Your critical analysis rebuilt from the data up by someone with no stake in the original — for when a result matters enough to need an outside check.

SB 253 Scope-3 Readiness Draft

quoted $18–35K

A readiness assessment for Scope 3 disclosure — where your value-chain data stands, what the gaps are, and what a defensible inventory would take — for a company preparing for Source · hover or focusCalifornia SB 253 (Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act): Scope 3 disclosure phases in from 2027, after the first Scope 1+2 reports; assurance requirements for Scope 3 are still being finalized by regulation.. Assessment and readiness only — not a Colorado-nexus solicitation.

Custom Dataset + Methodology Build Draft

quoted $18–40K focused · $60–150K major

You can't find the data, so I build it: source-traceable, cited, and yours. A purpose-built dataset with the methodology documented alongside it — from a focused single-source build to a major multi-source library. Priced by scope; the focused and major bands mark the range.

Program Evaluation — Focused Draft

quoted $20–45K

A single-question evaluation of one program or intervention — a defined evaluation design, the analysis, and a findings memo you can put in front of a board or a funder.

Program Evaluation — Impact / Multi-Site Draft

quoted $90–250K

A larger impact evaluation across multiple sites or a full program — design, data collection support, analysis, and a defensible impact narrative built to survive outside scrutiny.

Engagement formats

How we work together

The step-by-step mechanics — first contact to handoff — are on How I work.

Every engagement is senior-led — I'm the one on the keys. Below are the shapes an engagement can take. The right one usually becomes obvious in the first conversation.

Format	Commitment	Duration	Pricing model
Advisory hours	Methodology consultation, sense-checking, or strategy work	1 to 10 hours	Fixed-fee per hour or session
Defined project	Single deliverable — a model, report, dashboard, or pipeline	Usually 1–6 months	Fixed-bid or milestone-based
Fractional engagement	Methodology-on-call for a startup, research center, or NGO	1–2 days per week, ongoing	Monthly retainer
Long engagement	Often academic research projects or government work	Multi-month or multi-year (6+ months)	Time-and-materials or milestone-based
Workshop or training	Custom-designed for the client's team — systems thinking, GHG inventory methodology, network analysis fundamentals	Single-day to multi-day intensive	Fixed-fee, quoted per engagement

What I do

One method underneath everything

The practice isn't a grid of unrelated skills. It's one architecture — turn a messy body of evidence into a model or an inventory where every number carries its source — applied wherever the answer has to hold up. The same graph, the same feedback structure, and the same provenance discipline run a GHG inventory, a corruption network, and an SDG model.

The loop the practice runs on: evidence feeds the model, the model informs the decision, and the decision generates new evidence. Reinforcing — every pass strengthens the record.

The capabilities

Six methods, ranked by the role they play — not a menu of equals. Provenance and verification is the named through-line: it's what ties the rest together, and it's the product.

Backbone

Systems thinking & system dynamics

Systems thinking, system dynamics, complexity science, and agent-based modeling — causal-loop and stock-and-flow structure, the backbone the rest hangs on. For feedback loops, pressure points, and emergent behavior in tightly coupled human-technical-environmental systems.

The through-line

Provenance & verification

Every figure traced to its source; methodology audited, results replicable. This is the product — the discipline that makes a GHG inventory, a network graph, or a model defensible when someone challenges it.

Execution

Data science & ML

ETL pipelines, data architecture, statistics, dashboards, and visualization. I've built data libraries combining 50+ international datasets and 500,000+ unique points, automating workflows that previously took weeks by hand.

Execution

Network & graph analysis

Graph theory, social and corporate network analysis, centrality, and community detection — NetworkX, SciKit-Network, Neo4j with Cypher, and Gephi. Published applications in political corruption mapping and conflict-affected networks.

Execution

Geospatial

Spatial analysis, geocoding, geospatial ML, and cartographic visualization in QGIS and ArcGIS with Python (GeoPandas, GeoPy). Most recently a 2-million-point geo-database of administrative areas, transit routes, and climate regimes.

Emerging

AI engineering

Local, auditable, verification-gated AI — LLM pipelines, NLP, and document extraction at scale, held to the same provenance standard as everything above. Recent work: a multi-engine OCR-plus-LLM pipeline ingesting millions of regulatory documents.

The domains — five, in two clusters

I work across five domains, grouped into the two clusters that map to how buyers arrive: climate & GHG accounting and sustainability & energy systems on one side; peace engineering & conflict, governance & anti-corruption, and international development on the other. Most engagements sit in one, but the method carries across both.

Climate, energy & sustainability

Climate & GHG accounting, energy and resource systems, decarbonization strategy. End-to-end Scope 1, 2, and 3 inventories and reporting against the GHG Protocol, SBTi, CDP, GRI, SECR, CSRD, and TCFD; renewable-energy and policy modeling with foundations at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The compliance and disclosure work lives here — including work Source · hover or focusGrant, Zelinka & Mitova (2021), Environmental Research Letters — I co-authored the climate analysis. Read the case →.

Enterprise & compliance →

Conflict, governance & development

Peace and conflict, governance and anti-corruption, and international development — the mission and evaluation work. Multi-year engagements with the United States Institute of Peace (Burkina Faso judicial reform), network analysis of political corruption with USIP and Transparency International in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Santa Fe Institute peacebuilding research, and fieldwork in the West Bank, Burkina Faso, and Central Asia.

Foundations & mission →

What I won't work on

Civitas Systems will not work on oil and gas extraction, defense and weapons systems, or surveillance technology. Sustainability claims I can't methodologically defend are also out. The refusal list is part of the offer.

Discuss an engagement