Spain’s Old Ways May Show How to Keep Cool
August 18th, 2025
Courtesy of The New York Times, a look at how Spain has been living with extreme heat for centuries, and its people have ways of coping: Javier Recio held a lawn chair like a parasol over his mother’s head. The two had given up on sitting outside and were walking home through one of the […]
Read more »A Startup Is Tapping Underground Parking Garages for Clean Energy
August 16th, 2025
Via Bloomberg, a look at a startup that is tapping underground parking garages for clean energy: The heat held in New York’s underground labyrinth of infrastructure, from hundreds of miles of subway tunnels to parking garages and malls, is a clean energy gold mine. Now, a Swiss startup wants to tap it to heat and […]
Read more »How Green Walls Are Helping Saudi Arabia Reimagine Urban Life Amid Water and Climate Challenges
August 12th, 2025
Via Arab News, a report on how green walls are helping Saudi Arabia reimagine urban life amid water and climate challenges: Green walls use vegetation to insulate buildings, reduce urban heat, cut emissions, and enhance air quality year-round Experts say vertical gardens could become vital infrastructure as Saudi cities adapt to climate change and population […]
Read more »Shade Will Make or Break American Cities
August 10th, 2025
Courtesy of The Atlantic, a look at how shade will make or break American cities: On a 92-degree Saturday afternoon in Portland, Oregon, I went looking for shade in Cully Park, which was built on top of an old landfill and opened in 2018. The city included plenty of trees in the design—I mean, this […]
Read more »Shade: The Promise Of A Forgotten Natural Resource.
August 10th, 2025
Via The Atlantic, a look at how — to survive a heating planet —humans need shade, lots of it: Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There’s no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it […]
Read more »Creating Climate-Smart Cities
August 6th, 2025
Via Yale School of the Environment, an article on how cities are on the front lines of climate change, but they also hold the key to reducing emissions: Rising temperatures are increasing the health risks of indoor heat stress for more than a billion people in urban areas across the Global South. Air conditioning can […]
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.