As We Build harder, Hotter Cities: It’s Vital To Protect and Grow Urban Green Spaces
June 19th, 2023
Via The Conversation, an article on the importance of urban green spaces: Recent extreme weather events have provided a foretaste of how supercharged storms might threaten our future. So the release today of a new report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) is very good timing. Titled “Are we building harder, hotter cities? The vital […]
Read more »Air Conditioning Can’t Stop Climate Migration
June 19th, 2023
Via Bloomberg, commentary on how humans are being pushed out of our temperature comfort zone. It’s a good time to be in the air-conditioning business. As my colleagues at Bloomberg News write, an additional 1 billion cooling units are expected to be installed by the end of the decade. It’s one of the main ways in which […]
Read more »Quantifying The Human Cost of Global Warming
June 19th, 2023
One in five people could live in dangerously hot conditions by the end of the century if global warming continues at its current pace, even if nations uphold their pledges under the Paris Agreement, scientists warned in a new peer-reviewed study. It’s the latest research published in recent days that points to the stark human […]
Read more »Five Ways Finance Is Trying to De-Risk Heat Waves
June 19th, 2023
Courtesy of Bloomberg, an article on how – from heatstroke insurance for humans to policies that reimburse farmers for lower milk output – more financial products are addressing climate change: Climate change-driven heat waves are impacting everything from nuclear reactors in France to glaciers in Pakistan. As millions of people around the world are forced to cope with more […]
Read more »Hot Cities, Chilled Economies: Impact Of Extreme Heat on Global Cities
June 19th, 2023
Via the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock), a report assessing the social and economic effects of extreme heat through the prism of twelve cities that are already enduring and addressing dramatic impacts of heat waves: Global summary The world is burning. Unfortunately, that’s not an exaggeration. Climate-driven heat is changing the way we live and work. […]
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.