Cities, Structures, and Climate Shocks

This course is about building sustainable and resilient cities, future proofing real estate and infrastructure assets, and examining how businesses and investors find opportunities in climate adaptation.

The world faces substantial challenges in the face of pressures including rapid urbanization as well as existing and worsening scarcity of resources like energy, water, land and power. Many of these situations are exacerbated by the onset of more frequent and more intense natural perils related to climate change such as wildfire, river flooding, sea level rise, extreme heat, and drought. These events will have wildly variable impacts by geography, peril, wealth, vulnerability, and time frame.

How will individuals, businesses, investors, governments, and global society make choices around what assets – and people – to support, to protect, or to relocate in the response to these phenomena?

There are substantial opportunities to create and share value using a variety of analytical tools, materials and methods, risk transfer mechanisms, and finance and contractual structures.