How To See If Your City Is Poised To Bounce Back From The Next Climate Disaster
November 25th, 2024
Via The Washington Post, an article on how to see if your city is poised to bounce back from the next climate disaster: How do you pick a safe place to live? Climate scientists predict an intensifying barrage of hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, flooding and sea-level rise in many places. These disasters are already threatening, and even demolishing, homes. But risk is not all. Resilience, the […]
Read more »To Cope with Extreme Heat, Paris Will Swap Parking Spaces for Trees
November 19th, 2024
Via Yale e360, a report on Paris’s plan to swap parking spaces for trees: Paris aims to replace 60,000 parking spaces across the city with trees by the end of this decade, according to its newly released climate plan. The plan, which must still be approved by the Council of Paris, lays out steps to help […]
Read more »How Urban Planners Can Use Trees To Cool Entire Cities
November 5th, 2024
Via Terra Daily, a look at how urban planners can use trees to cool entire cities: Cities worldwide face rising temperatures, with urban areas particularly vulnerable due to heat absorption by concrete and asphalt. Tree-planting programs are a popular strategy to counteract urban heat, yet these initiatives often rely on estimates rather than precise science. […]
Read more »Climate Change: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate
November 5th, 2024
Courtesy of The Washington Post, a look at how climate change is rewriting the rules of real estate: Three years ago, Owen Woolcock was on Zoom trying to convince a real estate investor to swap some of his buildings in the New York City area for properties in cities around the Great Lakes. Climate change was overturning […]
Read more »The Passive Home Trend Is Booming
November 1st, 2024
Courtesy of The Washington Post, a look at passive homes, green homes designed to be as energy efficient as possible. New incentives aim to make them more budget-friendly. On the morning of June 7, 2023, New York City woke to a sky of orange haze as the smoke from Canadian wildfires blew in from hundreds […]
Read more »The AI Boom Rests on Billions of Tonnes of Concrete
October 31st, 2024
Via IEEE’s Spectrum Magazine, a look at the impact that concrete is having upon the climate challenge: Along the country road that leads to ATL4, a giant data center going up east of Atlanta, dozens of parked cars and pickups lean tenuously on the narrow dirt shoulders. The many out-of-state plates are typical of the phalanx […]
Read more »'Black Swans' are highly improbable events that come as a surprise, have major disruptive effects, and that are often rationalized after the fact as if they had been predictable to begin with. In our rapidly warming world, such events are occurring ever more frequently and include wildfires, floods, extreme heat, and drought.
'Green Shoots' is a term used to describe signs of economic recovery or positive data during a downturn. It references a period of growth and recovery, when plants start to show signs of health and life, and, therefore, has been employed as a metaphor for a recovering economy.
It is my hope that Black Swans / Green Shoots will help readers understand both climate-activated risk and opportunity so that you may invest in, advise, or lead organizations in the context of increasing pressures of global urbanization, resource scarcity, and perils relating to climate change. I believe that the tools of business and finance can help individuals, businesses, and global society make informed choices about who and what to protect, and I hope that this blog provides some insight into the policy and private sector tools used to assess investments in resilient reinforcement, response, or recovery.