This Paint Sweats To Cool Off Buildings. No Energy Required.
June 25th, 2025
Via Anthropocene Magazine, a look at an innovative paint that replenishes its water supply by absorbing rain and water vapor. Its porous structure holds the water and then slowly releases it much like sweat. Ultra-bright white paints are the go-to when it comes to cooling buildings. Those paints work by reflecting as much of the sun as […]
Read more »India Is Using AI and Satellites to Map Urban Heat Vulnerability Down to the Building Level
June 23rd, 2025
Via Wired, a look at how remote-sensing data and artificial intelligence are mapping the most heat-vulnerable buildings in cities like Delhi, in an effort to target relief from extreme temperatures at a granular level. Zubaida starts her day at eight in the morning, sorting discarded plastics, glass, and chemicals with her bare hands, to collect items […]
Read more »Reforesting the Elm City
June 21st, 2025
Via Yale Alumni Magazine, a look at how the Urban Resources Initiative is planting thousands of trees to make New Haven a cooler city: At first, planting street trees in New Haven was nothing more than a job for William “The Muscle” Tisdale. “I never paid too much attention to trees,” he says. He appreciated steady […]
Read more »Cities Around The World Are Sinking At Worrying Speed
June 14th, 2025
Via BBC, a report on how cities around the world are sinking at ‘worrying speed’: Twenty-two years ago, when Erna stood outside her house, “the windows were as high as my chest”. Now they’re knee-height. As their home has sunk, she and her family have had to cope with frequent flooding. In the most extreme […]
Read more »Cracks Starting To Show: Homeowners Battle Insurers Over $2.9 Trillion Climate Risk
June 14th, 2025
Via Bloomberg, a report on how subsidence is a worsening risk and insurers don’t want to pick up the tab. When Bernard Weisse first noticed a tiny crack in the outer wall of his house on the outskirts of Paris, he dismissed it as little more than a nuisance. But in the four years since, […]
Read more »America’s Sinking Cities
June 14th, 2025
Via Visual Capitalist, a look at subsidence in the U.S.: Across the U.S., major urban centers are experiencing significant land subsidence, a.k.a the sinking of land. This map visualizes the average vertical land movement within 28 of the largest U.S. cities from 2015 to 2021, measured in milimeters per year. Data comes from a 2025 […]
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.