Paris Braces for a Future of Possibly Paralyzing Heat
August 18th, 2025
Courtesy of the New York Times, a report on how Paris city planners are preparing for the day when temperatures as high as 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius, could stall the French capital: Imagine Paris at 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or 50 Celsius. The asphalt streets would melt in spots, making it virtually impossible for […]
Read more »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 »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 »‘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 »Germans Are Finally Embracing Air Conditioning: Even AC for Renters
July 26th, 2025
Via Bloomberg, a look at the growing use of air conditioning in Europe: Many homes in Germany don’t have air conditioning and are now using portable units to cool down due to increasingly frequent heat waves. According to Marc Evans, “Air conditioning isn’t the solution to our problems, but it’s the only solution we have […]
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.