Climate Week NYC recently concluded and provided “a global opportunity to come together to accelerate climate action.” The week offers a number of interesting events, report releases, and articles centered around the topic.

Today we’re focusing on some public finance related events during Climate Week, the UN, and how are things a month after Hurricane Ida made landfall.

IN FOCUS

A Few Climate Week Events of Note

• 2021 ESG Issuer Engagement Report Breckinridge

• Do U.S. municipal bonds finance petrochemicals and plastics instead of schools? Planet Tracker

• Advancing Net Zero Ambitions for the Transportation Sector PANYNJ

Climate Change and The UN Meetings

• Glasgow Climate Summit Faces ‘High Risk of Failure,’ U.N. Leader Says WSJ

• Johnson tells UN it is time for humanity to ‘grow up’ on climate change The Irish Times

• Biden Urges Global Action on Climate and Doubles U.S. Pledge Bloomberg

What’s Going on a Month After Ida Made Landfall?

• New Orleans hasn’t picked up some people’s trash for weeks since Ida. They’re begging to get rid of the stench. Washington Post

• Louisiana's struggling seafood industry teetering after Ida WBRZ2

• How Can New York City Prepare for the Next Ida? Here’s a To-Do List. NY Times

• Undocumented Immigrant New Yorkers Shut Out of Federal Hurricane Ida Aid The City

CHART OF THE WEEK

Hurricane Ida caused preventable deaths in flooded illegal basement apartments in New York City. The Regional Plan Association (RPA) recently completed a vulnerability analysis of the city’s housing stock to flooding, with a focus on small residential buildings.

Findings of the Study:

• There are approximately 180,000 small residential buildings that remain vulnerable to future high-intensity rainfall flooding (about 25% of all residential buildings in the city).

• There are about 295,000 homes in these small residential buildings vulnerable to future flooding that tend to be widely dispersed throughout the city.

Why this Matters:

• No one knows the actual number of basement spaces that have been converted to unlicensed apartments.

• The spread of vulnerable buildings throughout the city makes relocation strategies, or “managed ​retreat,” a challenging option.

• More resources are needed to determine the magnitude of risk to the city’s housing stock .

INTERESTING READS

Rethinking climate finance to improve infrastructure resilience Brookings

• The Issue: Financial markets are a significant way to drive public and private action on climate resilience.

• Key Statement:

Even though climate challenges are mounting across the built environment and the level of needed investment is massive, a lack of coordinated action is perhaps the biggest barrier to drive more resilient infrastructure improvements nationally.

Financing climate-resilient infrastructure: Determining risk, reward, and return on investment Higher Education Press

• The Issue: There is an “anti-infrastructure bias” built into the budgeting process; the paper proposes a generic framework to identify what are the necessary and sufficient factors to economically favor climate-change resilient infrastructure in private investment decisions.

• Key Statement:

Only with recognition of the co-benefits that carbon pricing and emissions trading schemes make possible will cities overcome their myopic focus on minimizing the short-term cost (and maximizing the short-term ROI) on their infrastructure investments.

Share

Any opinions expressed herein are those of the author and the author alone.