Market Forces

New York City, along with the rest of the mid-Atlantic, is seeing more extreme rainfall events that overwhelm local infrastructure and lead to localized, but often severe, flooding. These flash floods can impose myriad costs on residents from lost income when businesses are interrupted to higher commuting costs when transit is flooded to the need to muck out homes and repair flood damage. 

When disasters like this strike, access to funds is crucial for covering immediate expenses. Unfortunately, low- and moderate-income (LMI) households often lack the resources to meet these urgent needs, leading to financial distress that can persist long after the disaster has passed. To help address this, a group of partners crossing sectors designed a learning-pilot that consists of an emergency assistance program, financed by a novel parametric insurance product. The project team has recently published a new report summarizing lessons from this effort. Read the report here.

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As the effects of climate change continue to unfold, all communities across the U.S. will face a wider range of risks. However, some communities will be more affected by those risks due to greater exposure and limited ability to recover from their effects.  

For two neighboring communities in Detroit, the U.S. Climate Vulnerability Index, a new tool developed by Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University in partnership with many others, illustrates how a community’s baseline vulnerability can determine its capacity to address devastating floods, storms, droughts, wildfires and other extreme weather events.  Read More »

Last Monday, Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University unveiled the Climate Vulnerability Index (CVI), a robust, data-driven mapping tool built to highlight how drivers of cumulative vulnerability and exposure to climate impacts disadvantage communities across the U.S. Combining 184 sets of data, or “indicators,” to rank more than 70,000 U.S. Census tracts, the CVI offers the most complete look at lived experience down to the neighborhood level.  Read More »