How a new climate finance framework can shift the U.S. approach to investing in urban resilience
This report lays out several market principles that public and private leaders should consider in executing future investments in urban spaces. As climate change continues to intensify, a significant and immediate challenge continues to surround the country’s urban built environment: an increasingly vulnerable network of transportation, water, and private real estate assets. The report describes the current climate investment challenges facing U.S. infrastructure (with an emphasis on assets beyond energy) and exploring the current broken chain of steps during infrastructure project delivery and real estate development. The report then discusses the potential for greater urban resilience, how financial markets can support it, and the various actors involved. Finally, the report examines how a new climate finance framework can promote a more connected cycle of steps that addresses existing pain points and accelerates more frequent, widespread resilient improvements nationally.
This report finds that at a fundamental level, the U.S. needs a clearer process that is not a broken chain struggling to get individual projects done in individual places, but instead is a connected cycle accelerating the completion of collections of projects in collections of places. Multiple experts interviewed for this report emphasized how state and local leaders in transportation and water need to embed resilience in their plans and project delivery approaches, allowing for the more visible aggregation of resilient projects to be financed. Real estate developers, owners, investors, and regulators also need to recognize the climate needs in existing and future projects. That means they need to account for and address the impacts of bad projects—whether at the planning stages, or worse, once built—and adjust the market and policy rules that incentivize them in the first place.