YouSaid · the spoken record

Amanda Hinley

lines on the record: 23
first: 2019-09-25
most recent: 2019-09-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So we're going to let our client demand lead us as we always do, but there are so many interesting things going on in the broader climate sphere and in the ESG sphere as well. And our clients are starting to look at more innovative ways of raising financing, of looking at climate bonds and all other sort of interesting projects. And so for us, we want to see this continue to take off and be a topic of focus, but we're likely to explore others and we may continue to talk about adaptation. We may do it relative to food, for example, and agriculture. But if the client demand changes, we'll explore other areas as well.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a hundred percent my takeaway as well, which is just how little capital is actually going towards this question. Now, the one caveat I would say is, even as we were conducting the research and thinking through these particular questions, we started to see people begin to talk about these issues a little bit more than they had in the past. So it feels a little bit like maybe that is on the precipice of changing, but only time will tell. For us, I think really the lack of focus on resilience was the most”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say for both of us, and actually for the whole team that worked on the report, it was how little attention goes to this question of adaptation. Despite all the focus on climate change, it's this point where we started. The resources, the attention, the money are going to reducing carbon. And of course, that's critical, but we were really surprised by how few people are focusing on adaptation in an action-oriented way.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investment because these are tail risk events that aren't going to become more predictable the closer you get to them. In fact, weighting may make it so that it's too late and you've already lost your ability to get ahead of some of the challenges. Still makes this a difficult question to answer for investors. And so our general recommendation is start now, start now particularly if you have areas of exposure that you're aware of and where you can begin to think about investing and try to do it in ways that enable you over time to adapt those investments as things change and so that you can benefit from input costs in economies of scale that come from new technologies that emerge that make some of these problems easier to adapt to and to address and more economically feasible ways over time.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you think about the question from a traditional investment perspective, the answer is usually pretty straightforward. You have a pool of capital, you invest it, you think about what the returns are on that capital over time, and you decide to invest today or later, depending on which is going to earn you a higher return. This is far more complicated because what you're talking about as the climate changes are extreme tail events and the risk of those events. And what's so uncertain about the changing climate is what events will occur when, what path will they take, what other knock-on consequences could occur? So you hear people talking about melting glacier ice caps and things like that. When irreversible events begin to unfold, the entire chain of risk changes. Our perspective is doesn't actually benefit you to wait to learn more information the way it would in a normal risk-reward situation where you're thinking about”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amanda, when should cities start to adapt? I mean, New York did a lot of work in the wake of Sandy. You know, that was a shock to the system and forced the city to think about its own resilience. And what type of cities need to move the quickest?”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In developing countries, you also have international institutions like the World Bank and the Regional Development Banks, and they're already playing a really important role. And that will continue. Insurance matters too, in lots of ways, but mostly there needs to be a mechanism for pricing risk, like flood risk and fire risk. More realistically, so that people don't build and keep rebuilding again and again in flood-prone or fireprone areas.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're thinking about it as an all of the above approach. Even the most prosperous cities are not going to be able to fund this stuff alone. They have their local tax revenues in cities that are developing quickly may be able to benefit from taxes on land development. Some cities will turn to municipal bonds, but those aren't available in most of the world. But even where they are, that's not going to be enough. So cities are going to have to look to their national governments for funding. And then they're going to have to reach out to the private sector and think about public-private partnerships for these huge infrastructure projects like bridges and roads and potentially power systems. There's a role for institutional investors, particularly ones with a long-term outlook like sovereign wealth funds or like pension funds that are willing to make these very long-term commitments in investing.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Getting back to capital intensive, all the things that Amanda outlined cost a lot of money and time as well. How are you thinking about the infrastructure investment and financing challenge that all of this entails?”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to add one more, which is this question of soft infrastructure that requires a lot of urban planning. In addition to all of the hard infrastructure that Amanda talked about, you need other things like better health systems and probably more public health programs, and you need better education, and you need cooling centers to be opened up during these longer, hotter heat waves. You need places where people can go and they know they can take refuge from storms or hurricanes. It's less capital intensive than the infrastructure, but all of it is really important and it requires a lot of coordination within a city among all the different departments. And a lot of leadership too.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's a really broad question that we tackle in the paper, and we'll take you through some of the high-level ideas. But when you think about infrastructure more broadly, there's obviously cities that are developed today that are looking at infrastructure replacement cycles. And there are cities that are rapidly urbanizing, that are building infrastructure for the first time. Some of the rapidly urbanizing”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for people who want to move away from eating meat towards fish, that's a risk as well. Let's talk a little bit about infrastructure. What are the implications for cities as they think about renewing their infrastructure base or adding new infrastructure?”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's enough. Can I add one? No, can I add one when you think about the ocean acidifying and warming? There are effects to ecosystems, and we don't even know what all of the knock-on consequences of that will be. But again, the general scientific consensus would point to things like coral reefs potentially being extinct within this century, because they're fixed. They can't relocate to cooler waters or less acidic waters. For those of you who would like to see a coral reef in your lifetime, you may want to do that now.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also storms in places where people don't expect them, which we've also seen. And then in addition to that, you're likely to see threats to human health because there may be diseases moving out of places where they are now into places where people don't have immunity. And a lot of pressure on food and livestock and drinking water, which is already a problem in large parts of the world, especially drinking water. So, there are a lot of others, but I think that's enough to stop now. Yeah, that's enough. Can I add one? No, can I add one?”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amount of economic activity on the coast, so think of New York obviously, Tokyo, Mumbai, those are all at risk from flooding. We are probably also going to see more destructive weather events. No one needs to be reminded of. Those are already underway. So storms, wind, flooding, fire. Wildfires think of them.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, you said at the beginning, Sandra, that there's near to universal scientific consensus around that human behaviors contributing to climate change. What are the consequences that scientists are pointing to or focused on? Well, as a preface, we're not scientists and we are not trying to make a scientific argument. We know that there's a lot of still uncertainty about the magnitude, the timing, the scope. But we're looking at the consensus, which is in fact that the earth is warming and is likely to continue to warm. And so the consensus is also that there's a pretty wide range of negative outcomes that could come from this. So these include hotter temperatures, more heat waves, longer heat waves, hotter heat waves, rising sea levels that are going to flood coastal cities. You know, it's worth noting that about 40% of the world's population lives within 100 kilometers or 60 miles of the coast. And obviously you have huge cities producing a tremendous”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now even within cities, even the most prosperous ones, because to the exact point Jake, you raised at the outset, financial resources are not unlimited, those cities are still going to have to make choices about where to allocate funds and what makes the most sense. And again, that may also raise questions of fairness, even within cities that are relatively prosperous.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about cities, not all cities have the same benefits or advantages, and some cities are more economically prosperous and have large, dense populations, and may also have a prior track record of raising financing to undergo infrastructure projects of the sort that we discuss in this paper. And those cities are likely to have a natural advantage in continuing down the path of thinking through becoming more resilient to climate change. There are other cities that may have less dense populations or less robust economic activity, or maybe in geographic locations that are simply not beneficial to them and that make technically adapting more difficult or unfeasible and that may simply lack the resources to make adaptation work for them. So there are going to be questions of fairness across cities, not every city is going to have the same resources and the same benefits.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, this question of global versus local, so climate change is certainly a global problem. But when you're asking people to solve a global problem, sometimes the results are not obvious to them and it's hard to motivate them. If you say your city is at risk of flooding and you need to pay taxes to protect your city, your home, your business from flooding, that's easier to motivate people politically. Yeah, I certainly spend a lot of time in the wake of Sandy thinking about that here in downtown. One of the things you talk about in the report is this issue of fairness and that as my mother used to say, life is not always fair. Mine too. What do you mean by that in this context?”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“or alternative sources of energy being used, but cities are much less far along in thinking about how to adapt. And again, there are a lot of people who live in cities, and there's a lot of economic activity concentrated there. And so, again, adaptation is likely to occur outside of cities as well, but it's a reasonable starting point to think about cities.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a good question. We struggled with a little bit because we know that climate change and the need to adapt to climate change is not a local problem. It's a global problem. But part of the reason why we really tried to concentrate on cities was twofold. One of them is that cities today are already home to more than half of the global population, and that's a share that's only expected to grow over time. And the other reason is that cities produce roughly 80% of global GDP. And so the combination of population density and economic activity makes it likely when you think about this from an investment perspective that cities would be on the front lines of beginning to experiment and go down the path of really truly adapting to climate change. Now to Sandra's point, I think cities are already doing really interesting things as it relates to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We see more bike lanes, more parks.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of these are likely to occur more frequently in the next few years. Right. And you get into the question of how you allocate resources too, because resources are not infinite. Amanda, why did you hone in on cities in particular and not more rural or suburban communities?”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did a lot of research on the topic of climate change, and we were really stuck by how much attention goes to reducing carbon emissions and how little attention goes to this question of adaptation. While reducing carbon is incredibly important, and those efforts need to continue and they actually need to accelerate, it doesn't seem like there'll be enough for the world to withstand what's coming because the scientists say that the world has already warmed by about one degree Celsius over the past century and a bit, and that the world is going to continue to warm, and that's for a couple of reasons. One is that there's just so much carbon already accumulated in the air, in the oceans, and that's going to continue this warming process that can't just be turned off quickly. And secondly, because despite some progress on reducing emissions, the trajectory is not where it needs to be. So the world is going to continue to warm, and that means that the world is going to need to adapt to the changes that are coming, heat, storms, flooding.”
2019-09-25 · Goldman Sachs Exchanges · How Can Cities Adapt to Climate Change? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT