New York City’s $52B Plan To Save Itself From The Sea
September 20th, 2023
Courtesy of The Guardian, an article on New York City’s plan to protect the region from rising waters: The retired FDNY firefighter Patrick Kilgallen remembers the night well. In late October 2012, the approach of Hurricane Sandy up the US Eastern Seaboard coincided with a spring tide, propelling a surge of storm water that crashed into New […]
Read more »Heat Action Platform
September 19th, 2023
Useful to see Arsht-Rock’s newly launched Heat Action Platform which people can use to assess their city’s heat resilience and find the solutions that work for their community. Reflecting input from cities, community-serving organizations, extreme heat risk and resilience experts, the platform has nine heat resilience modules filled with the data-informed and tested solutions, materials, […]
Read more »In Miami, It’s No Coincidence Marginalized Neighborhoods Are Hotter
September 18th, 2023
Via Inside Climate News, a report on new research that suggests the problem traces to a historical federal program that was turned against those who needed it most, through a practice known as redlining. On another hot September day here, Bereatha Howard sat sipping water in the dappled shade of a leafy tree. The high […]
Read more »Outfitting School Buildings For Extreme Heat ‘Not That Hard,’ Says Expert
September 14th, 2023
Via Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, commentary on the need to retrofit schools for extreme heat: Near-triple-digit temperatures during the first week of the new school year led some districts in the U.S. to ether close or dismiss students early. According to healthy buildings expert Joseph Allen, the extreme heat was “entirely predictable”—and fixing the […]
Read more »Los Angeles’ Green Streets Replenishing Aquifers
September 12th, 2023
Via Blue and Green Cities, an article on Los Angeles’ green infrastructure: In California, the Southern California Water Replenishment District estimates that in a single year alone, Los Angeles loses 58 trillion gallons of water to the ocean. To collect some of this excess water off the city’s impervious surfaces, the city is designing and […]
Read more »Becoming a ‘Sponge City’ at Shenzhen Speed
September 6th, 2023
Via The Diplomat, a look at how Shenzhen is a prime example of China’s Sponge City Program, which aims to both prevent flooding and increase water supply in urban areas: In 2017, the city of Shenzhen, China invited foreign teachers like me to visit Futian Mangrove Nature Reserve, on the coast of Shenzhen Bay overlooking […]
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.