U.S. cities from Hoboken, New Jersey, to Los Angeles are taking steps to ensure that their infrastructure can sustain direct hits from major hurricanes and floods. “It's interesting to me how the awareness of these issues is changing so quickly,” said Shelley Poticha, director of urban solutions at the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council.
What if catastrophe bonds could be used to prevent losses, instead of paying for them? That’s the impulse behind RE.bound, a collaboration among Goldman Sachs, The Rockefeller Foundation, Swiss Re, risk modeler RMS and consultancy re:focus partners.
Recent science argues that humans have already pushed Earth past the safe level for carbon dioxide concentrations — and that we’re heading toward, if not certain destruction, then at least a planet “much less hospitable to the development of human societies.”
A new initiative called RE.bound has been launched which will leverage catastrophe bond technology to design and structure new risk transfer solutions that provide a mechanism for resilient infrastructure project financing.
A new report details how cities can leverage private investment in building more resilient and integrated infrastructure. A Roadmap for Resilience summarizes projects that create both public value and private investment opportunities, and that will create a robust pipeline of investable resilient infrastructure projects to benefit communities and society.
Cities are built around silos. Water treatment plants are handled by the water utility; roads and bridges fall to the department of transportation; power grids are maintained by electric companies. Under this system, there are some major gaps—needs at the seams of sectors can go unmet, failures in one area can domino into another—but, more [...]
