Taking On Water: Can Sponge Cities Save Us from the Coming Floods?
April 25th, 2026
Courtesy of The New Yorker, a look at how – as the planet gets warmer and the rains fall harder – the future of flood control is looking less like a wall and something more like a park: On October 29, 2025, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority released an update to its Climate Resilience Roadmap. In […]
Read more »‘Sponge City’: How Copenhagen Is Adapting to a Wetter Future
July 31st, 2025
Via Yale e360, an article on how climate change is bringing ever more precipitation and rising seas to low-lying Denmark. In response to troubling predictions, Copenhagen is enacting an ambitious plan to build hundreds of nature-based and engineered projects to soak up, store, and redistribute future floods. In just two hours on July 2, 2011, […]
Read more »A Conversation with Dr. Kongjian Yu on Restoring Our “Sponge Planet”
July 22nd, 2025
Via China Water Risk, an interview with the “Father of Sponge Cities to see how concrete cities can become better-equipped for extreme rainfall & flash floods: After witnessing grey infrastructure collapse in the 1998 Yangtze floods, Dr. Yu developed the idea of a “sponge city” to restore water’s natural flows; Today it’s been adopted as […]
Read more »Flood and Drought Risk Increasing In Cities
March 18th, 2025
Via BBC, a look at the growing water-related risks facing cities: The world’s 100 most populated cities are becoming increasingly exposed to flooding and drought, according to new research. Charity WaterAid worked with the University of Bristol and Cardiff University on a study using data on climate hazards. The research found that 17% of the […]
Read more »The UK Is Losing the Race Against Devastating Floods
December 13th, 2024
Via Bloomberg, a look at how a first-of-its-kind insurance program bought some in the UK time to shore up flood defenses, but exclusive data shows that isn’t happening quickly enough: About 900 years ago, Medieval monks began resurrecting an expanse of land in southwest England that languished underwater for half the year. Stone by stone, […]
Read more »Copenhagen’s Biggest Climate Threat: Water
December 6th, 2024
Via Terra Daily, a look at how Copenhagen takes on its biggest climate threat — water: In low-lying Copenhagen where rising sea levels, groundwater and rainfall pose a risk to infrastructure, the Danish capital is trying to adapt and protect urban areas from climate change.And Karens Minde park is one of the more than 300 projects […]
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.