March 1st, 2025
Trees are often called the “lungs of the Earth,” and a recent study backs that up. The research out of Los Angeles found that the city’s trees are even more generous when it comes to carbon dioxide storage than expected, absorbing 60% of daytime CO2 emissions in the spring and summer and about 30% annually in the study area.
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To tackle the difficult task of tallying carbon dioxide, scientists installed a dozen high-quality sensors across a 15-by-6-mile section of central LA. These sensors produced detailed maps of how CO2 concentrations changed as air moved through the urban landscape, allowing the team to quantify urban emissions with precision.
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“You can think of emissions like passengers on a train,” Will Berelson, the study’s lead researcher, said in a press release. “As the wind moves pollution through the city, some gets picked up and some gets dropped off. These sensors let us see that process in real time.”
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One of the other surprising takeaways is that trees absorb the most CO2 in the summer months, which, though part of the growing season, are the city’s driest. That’s thanks to LA’s abundant urban greenery, boosted by irrigation systems, resilient tree species, and groundwater access. “Nature is helping us,” Berelson said, “but we can’t rely on it to do all the work.
'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.