Making Cities More Absorbent: The Porous City Network
September 6th, 2023 Via Bloomberg, a look at efforts to make cities more absorbent: Kotchakorn Voraakhom is the founder and CEO of Landprocess, a landscape architecture company in Bangkok whose designs incorporate [...]
Cooling the Heat: Can India Lead the World in Green Cooling Innovation
September 5th, 2023 Via the World Bank, commentary on India’s potential to help develop innovations to adapt to extreme heat: In recent months, India has broken several temperature records, recording its hottest [...]
New Air-Conditioning Technology Could Be the Future of Cool
September 4th, 2023 Via Scientific American, an article on new air conditioning technology that aims to reduce cooling’s impact to global warming: This past July was the hottest recorded month in human history. [...]
Solar Power Alongside California’s Highways
September 1st, 2023 Via Environment America, a report on the potential for California to take advantage of the vast, untapped solar energy potential next to its highways: California has long been a leader in renewable [...]
Welcome To The Pyrocene Era
September 1st, 2023 Via ClimateBase, a look at how human-influenced fire activity is shaping our world and six companies working to combat wildfire by leveraging everything from Machine Learning and AI to advanced [...]
One of the World’s First Insurance Schemes for Extreme Heat
August 25th, 2023 Via The Print, a report on one of the world’s first insurance schemes for extreme heat in which poor workers in Gujarat can receive payouts when temperatures add up to between 134C and 138C [...]

ABOUT
BLACK SWANS GREEN SHOOTS
Black Swans / Green Shoots examines the collision between urbanization and resource scarcity in a world affected by climate change, identifying opportunities to build sustainable cities and resilient infrastructure through the use of revolutionary capital, increased awareness, innovative technologies, and smart design to make a difference in the face of global and local climate perils.

'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.