Hence the rise of adaptation finance, which World Resources Institute has said is necessary as “poor rural areas are frequently the most in need of financial support to strengthen their resilience to climate change, yet they often have the fewest financial resources available.”

To that end, a key question was asked at “Resilience Day” during this week’s Global Climate Action Summit: how do we scale finance for adaptation?”

The question and responses are critically important because, as noted by Barbara Buchner, executive director of the Climate Policy Initiative, finance for climate adaptation in 2017 amounted to just $22 billion vs. $382 billion for climate mitigation.

Here are five answers based on input from several players in the adaptation investment field. These leaders include Sanjay Wagle, managing director of the private socially driven equity investment firm The Lightsmith Group; Dr. Buchner and Kirsten Dunlop, CEO of the European Union’s Climate-KIC; Kathy Baughman-McLeod, senior vice president of Global Environmental & Social Risk, Bank of America; and Mari Yoshitaka, chief consultant for the Clean Energy Finance Division of Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities. For adaptation finance to work and ensure resilience, the following must occur:

1. Get the adaptation-related policies right. Regulatory uncertainties hinder investors. Especially since finance flow is mostly domestic, investors care about predictability. Nonprofits, bilateral agencies and academic institutions can assist sovereigns with regulatory improvements.
2. Borrow innovative finance solutions from other sectors, including the vanilla approach of ensuring all government investments are adaptive to climate risk, as well as insurance-linked securities, green bonds and other scalable and replicable means.The International Finance Corporation and other multilateral investment banks can further this work, increasing their emphasis on adaptation from a historic emphasis on mitigation.
3. Move toward a globally accepted standard for resilience finance including language on the use of proceeds so the market grows with each investment. Commercial and investment banks should be part of this standard-setting, with engagement from the Financial Stability Board and others.
4. Create facilities, starting in markets easy for investors’ participation, where a blend of philanthropy, impact capital, development finance and regular market capital invests in products and where projects can be wrapped and warehoused for their marketability. Focus especially on multiplying the scant grant resources in ways that inspire more adaptation finance, not just one improved project. Philanthropies, development banks and green investment banks are part of this solution.
5. Make the existing knowledge about profitable adaptation solutions much more widely known, since investors remain unaware of opportunities in this space. All adaptation thought leaders need to make this a priority, turning risks into investment opportunities.

As the Summit comes and goes underway, it is important that we strive to ensure these five directives can help scale up climate adaptation.

This article originally appeared in Triple Pundit.

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March for Our Lives, whatever its immediate political impact, is a sign that the next generation–the “Plurals”–will be building on generational change initiated by the Millennials. My gurus on the topic of generational change, Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, explain how cycles of generational change occur and where we are in the current cycle–all hopeful trends for initiating and locking in big changes.

In “Meet the Plurals” they lay out the thesis of generational change and how the Plurals are different from previous generations:

Major change in America’s attitudes and beliefs occur about every forty years—the span of two generations. Millennials, now America’s largest generation, began the most recent such shift at the beginning of this century and now the generation after them is old enough to begin to make its mark on America and help the country find its way in the world Millennials continue to disrupt.

Generational attitudes and beliefs are shaped by the nature of events young people experience as they grow up and the way they are raised by their parents. Although the exact year demarcating the line between this new generation and its predecessor will have to await the perspective that history offers, everyone agrees the new generation’s memory of its upbringing, unlike older generations, consists entirely of events that occurred in this century.

We call this latest generation “Pluralist” and its members “Plurals” because their multi-ethnic, racial diversity is their most defining characteristic. Demographer William Frey estimates that whites make up only 51.5% of the Pluralist generation and by 2025 he estimates non-whites will comprise a majority of Plurals. As a result, how to get along with a wide range of people and ideas through compromise and dialogue is a skill as native to this generation’s DNA as confrontation and protest was to Boomers. See whole article

An implication for urban climate change rebels: pay attention to and engage with the Plurals in your city. they are your successors in transformation.

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So it’s no wonder that, having been elected to the state senate in 2016, Wiener is making his mark quickly on the matter of affordable housing, not only in his hometown of San Francisco, but across the Golden State, where affordable housing has risen to the top of the state’s policy agenda.

And for good reason: Between 2009 and 2014, the state added 544,000 households but only 467,000 net new housing units, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. It now ranks 49th in housing units per capita. Seven of the 10 most expensive real estate markets in the US are in California. McKinsey estimates that the housing crisis is costing California $140 billion a year in lost economic output. And the list of horribles goes on.

Which is why Wiener has led the charge on two major bills: SB35, which streamlines the approval process for affordable housing projects in communities that lag behind state housing targets, and a new law, SB 827, known as the Transit Zoning Bill, which would require that all areas within a half-mile of a major transit stop, or within a quarter-mile of a bus or transit corridor, allow minimum building heights of 45 or 85 feet (depending on distance from transit, street width and other criteria), superceding local zoning rules. The bill would also waive any minimum parking requirements and prohibit any design standards that would have the effect of lowering the square footage allowed on a lot.

SB 35 is now state law. SB 827 is pending. Their purpose is the same: to use the power of state action to override local inaction. As with other key social policy issues such as civil rights and environmental protection, many, but not all, local communities have proved that they can’t be trusted to do the right thing thanks largely to restrictive zoning laws and the entrenched power of Not In My Back Yard activists concerned about their property values or views or traffic or simply change itself. In some cases, it’s more insidious, like racism or classism.

Senator Wiener put it more eloquently and strategically: “We are moving past the era where every city in California could view itself as an independent kingdom that could refuse to build any housing. Our cities are all interconnected, and housing decisions in one city affect many other cities, and state law needs to reflect that.”

I think Senator Wiener is pushing California to do what it does best, to lead and innovate for the greater good, to rewrite the rules in the name of progress and change.

I also think, in due course, other states will follow. Or fall further behind.

The post In Praise of Scott Wiener appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

As the Times article describes,

California already had a housing crisis long before the fires started. With strict environmental rules and local politics that can discourage new housing development, the state’s pace of new construction has fallen far short of the state’s population growth.

In the five-year period ending in 2014, California added 544,000 households, but only 467,000 housing units, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, and the deficit is only expected to grow over the next decade. Napa and Sonoma Counties, where the fires did some of the most extensive damage, are among the furthest behind, building less than half the number of units in recent years that the state reckons were needed to keep up with the population.

Napa and Sonoma present a kind of worst-of-both-worlds scenario, according to Issi Romem, chief economist at BuildZoom, a San Francisco company that helps homeowners find contractors.

Those two counties are close enough to San Francisco and Silicon Valley that they have been affected by the heavy demand and soaring prices that have made housing unaffordable for many people in the Bay Area’s dense urban job centers, Mr. Romem said. At the same time, they are far enough away from cities that residents are still fiercely protective of their rural atmosphere and ethos, and they often resist development.

“Rebuilding is going to be tough unless some kind of streamlining is made,” he said.

Unaffordable cities. Rural areas resistant to growth. Wildfire refugees desperate for a place to rent. A warming planet made more volatile by air pollution from traffic jams and long commutes for those who have to drive to qualify.

Everything’s connected to everything else in a place called home.

Also from William Shutkin: Affordability is the New Sustainability and Prologue

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Oh yea, I forgot. I also helped Pete and John launch the Innovation Network for Communities and Urban Sustainability Associates a decade ago, which later gave rise to the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, Nupolis and eventually their latest project, Life After Carbon (I’ve registered my complaint about their title; carbon is, after all, essential to all living things. . . Enough said). Full circle.

When I turned 50, almost three years ago, I decided that, if and when the opportunity arose, and with sustainability now more or less mainstream, at least as an idea, I would try my hand at the for-profit world, take what I have learned and taught and apply it as a sustainable real estate developer, believing this is no oxymoron but instead, given the state of things, a mandate, a call to action. Words into deeds, this time with an equity stake.

My friend and colleague David Zucker, a Denver-based developer whom I had met in 2009 at a conference I co-hosted at CU Boulder on urban development and climate change, gave me my opportunity when he invited me in early 2016 to help him take on an ambitious development project in Boulder, a 15-acre site that lay vacant for decades along East Arapahoe, a major commuter corridor chock full of employers and a morass of light-industrial uses but lacking workforce housing or thoughtful urban design, hardly a problem unique to Boulder.

At East Arapahoe we propose to build 340 units of housing, 40 percent of which will be below-market rate, plus 16,000 square feet of affordable commercial space targeted at small businesses and non-profits who, like so many Boulder residents, are being priced out of the market. Of course, the project aims to be green and climate-friendly, with bike racks and PV panels aplenty. In Boulder, this almost goes without saying.

Some experience under my belt, and only a few battle scars, last spring I helped organize a large team to compete for another Boulder project, the redevelopment of the 5.5-acre, city-owned Pollard Jeep site at 30th and Pearl in the heart of Boulder Junction, the city’s nascent transit village, across the street from Google’s brand-new Boulder headquarters. In August, our team was notified that we won the project, beating out three other teams from around the country.

Like the East Arapahoe project, the Pollard project will be green, transit-oriented, mixed-income and mixed-use, with more than half of the 304 housing units priced below-market and 20,000 square feet of permanently affordable commercial space. We also hope to make the project fossil-fuel free — all-electric with near net-zero building design. From Pollard’s SUVs to Boulder’s showcase TOD. It’s almost poetic.

With two large projects underway, my experiment in for-profit real estate development has begun in earnest. I plan to use this blog as a chronicle of my and others’ experiences, a place to reflect, reveal and occasionally rant regarding what I see as both the challenges and opportunities, risks and rewards, of joining a social entrepreneur’s mission, values and ideas with the hardscrabble reality of getting good projects built in places like Boulder.

More Shutkin: Affordability is the New Sustainability and All Things Are Connected

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