February 4th, 2024
Courtesy of The New York Times, a report on how coastal cities are bracing for climate change:
Over the past few weeks, flooding from storms has battered cities in the South and the East Coast, from Louisiana to New Jersey. Overlapping atmospheric rivers over the West Coast have brought heavy rains that are likely to come back in the next few days.
So far this week, Californians have not seen the kinds of weather-generated disasters that struck last winter, with flooding in Ventura County in December and in San Diego in January, my colleague Jill Cowan reports.
Storms are part of the natural cycle that replenishes the water supplies that several states will rely on during the drier months to come, Judson Jones, The Times’s meteorologist, told me.
“The problem comes when there’s too much at one time,” he said.
Climate change makes that a lot more likely. Warmer air holds more moisture, which means storms in many parts of the world are getting wetter and more intense, as my colleague Ray Zhong explained during deluges last year.
Coastal areas are especially vulnerable to climate change, not just because of storms and floods, but from rising seas and erosion. These factors put a tenth of the world’s population, the 896 million people who live near the oceans, at risk. That includes one-fifth of Americans.
The good news is that there is a lot we can do. Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank that promotes environmental policies for coastal cities, has designed a framework that lays out dozens of solutions that governments and communities can implement.
“So often people assume that we need more technological innovation, or we need huge amounts of more money before we can actually do anything meaningful,” the group’s co-founder, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, said. But, she added, “There are so many solutions that we already have at our fingertips.”
Getting ready
Many U.S. coastal cities are large and influential but also have vulnerable populations that are disproportionately affected by pollution and global warming. Whatever cities decide to do can have a huge impact on the climate and the lives of these communities.
Several policies can address both issues. Cities can put in place programs to develop new work forces that will help build solar farms, or redesign waterfronts in ways that are both resilient to climate change and strengthen local economies.
City governments can also help take care of nature. Protecting and restoring coastal ecosystems is a relatively inexpensive strategy to both store planet-warming carbon and shield their residents, especially the most vulnerable, from storm surges and sea level rise.“It’s important to remember that there are solutions at every geographic scale,” Johnson said. “From a city block to a whole city.”
The work has already started
Over a third of U.S. cities have climate plans, according to research by Urban Ocean Lab and Columbia University. But implementation has been slow, and many cities are underestimating how much climate change will transform their communities.
There is money to act. Urban Ocean Lab identified a total of $21.7 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate bill, and in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, that coastal cities could use to get ready for global warming.
There are cities already doing a good job on climate:
My colleague Michael Kimmelman recently reported on the progress he has seen in flood-prone Hoboken, N.J., over the past decade. The city is elevating power lines, building cisterns and new sewers and redesigning to cope with rising seas and more intense rainfall.
New York City is working on a major environmental restoration project in Jamaica Bay to return salt marshes and sand dunes to their natural state to protect the ecosystem and the city.
Baltimore has implemented “resilience hubs,” places where people can gather to talk about their communities, cool off or get food supplies when disaster hits.
A big part of Johnson’s message is that communities need to be organized, and governments need to include them in the decision-making process, for any strategy to address climate change to work.
That means you, and your neighbors, too.
It’s a lot easier to influence municipal policy or a City Council race than it is to affect the outcome of a presidential election, Johnson said.
“Community organizations can certainly approach city government and have an influence on how resources are allocated, how policy and regulations are developed,” she said. “There is a lot of citizen power at the local level.”
That may mean showing up to seemingly inconsequential meetings that could ultimately decide how our cities are protected (or not) from climate change.
“Extreme weather doesn’t have to be a disaster,” Johnson said. “It’s the infrastructure and the built environment and where people live and how people live that determine how bad the impacts of something are.”
'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.