Come Hell or High Water: Building Community Resilience to Floods, Droughts and Water Contamination
October 11th, 2023
Courtesy of ImpactAlpha, a look at building community resilience to floods, droughts and water contamination: Water — too little, too much or too dirty — isn’t simply emerging as a climate consideration. It’s forcing its way into the conversation. Water professionals say it’s high time. “This is water’s moment,” Radhika Fox, the Environmental Protection Agency’s […]
Read more »New York’s Bluebelt Program
September 30th, 2023
As New York City experiences intense rainfall, it is instructive to look at Staten Island and one of the really successful measures that has been accomplished: the blue belt network. It’s a really great solution for handling intense rainfall and filtering water and water quality and biodiversity. But it’s not the kind of thing that […]
Read more »New York Needs to Get Spongier—or Get Used to More Floods
September 29th, 2023
Via Wired, a report on how devastating deluges around the world point to the metropolis of tomorrow: the “sponge city.” Think more parks and fewer parking lots. TWO YEARS AFTER the remnants of Hurricane Ian dumped up to 10 inches of rain on New York City in just two hours, the metropolis is once again inundated today by extreme […]
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 »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 nature-inspired parks and gardens that absorb and direct rain. As flood-prone coastal nations such as her native Thailand peer into a much wetter future, Voraakhom says softer, more […]
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.