Sadie Frank is a program manager at CarbonPlan, where her policy research portfolio covers climate risk and financial regulation. She is also a public voices fellow on the climate crisis with the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
A recent report from the Treasury Department’s Financial Stability Oversight Council called for financial regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve, and Federal Housing Finance Agency, to release the data they use in their investigations of climate-related financial risk. It’s mostly private companies and financial institutions that are privy to this information, and they are using it in assessments that could determine the fate of cities and communities across the United States.
These climate risk assessments inform investors’ decisions about where they put their money and when they cut their losses — moves that signal which communities will survive, even thrive, under climate change. Municipalities must be able to conduct their own analyses (with publicly available data), otherwise they’re in the dark about their own prospects for survival... Read more