[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host Lonnie.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: And I'm your other co host Jaron
[00:00:25] Speaker A: and and today we will be talking about climate resilience, including some highlights from our work in East Harlem. We also have an interview that Jaron recorded solo with Dr. Gary Yeoh, a Nobel Peace Prize winning climate economist, about the intersection between climate resilience and economics. But before we get into that, Jaron, can you share WEAC's mission?
[00:00:44] Speaker B: I sure can. WEAC's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and or low income residents participate meaningfully and in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Thank you so much. So to set the stage a little bit, at the time of this recording, it is the end of New York City Climate Week and we are in the midst of a citywide travel warning for Nor'. Easter that's going to bring a lot of rain, wind and coastal flooding. So this particular topic could not be more timely.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Indeed. Also, just last month, August 2026 tied with July 2023 for the hottest month ever recorded in history.
So I agree we could not be having this conversation at a more urgent moment in time.
Across the country, increasingly severe weather is exposing just how fragmented our systems really are. Emergency management, public health, housing, utilities, health care, local government, community organizations, all operating in their own lanes, often without the connective tissue to work together when it matters the most. A little chaotic.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Also on top of that, communities being asked to absorb the most escalating risk are often the same communities that have carried the burdens of disinvestment and environmental inequity for generations. They being asked to weather bigger storms with fewer resources and weaker governance structures to protect them before, during and after disaster hits.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Yeah. And for we act, East Harlem is representative of that overburdened community.
An anchor for Latino, Hispanic social and economic life, East Harlem has been the birthplace of some of the country's most prominent cultural, political and religious movements and icons. However, years of disinvestment, neglect and short sighted planning from the public and private sectors have stifled opportunity, undermined living standards, and allowed severe racial, economic and environmental disparities to proliferate.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: For example, East Harlem has one of the highest heat vulnerability index in the city, averaging 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the city average in August. So imagine the hottest August on record being amplified by a few by a couple degrees. It's also one of Manhattan's most flood vulnerable neighborhoods, meaning coastal flooding warnings are even more threatening.
And that's why we act is working with city and state agencies, legislators, community groups and East Harlem residents to create a comprehensive resiliency plan for East Harlem to identify federal and state funding to expand green infrastructure, fill existing gaps in waterfront revitalization plan, and ensure the equitable construction of the Second Avenue subway.
So basically, funding and reinvestment in East Harlem is crucial to its resilience and adaptability.
[00:03:33] Speaker B: As you can tell, lots of things in progress before we hop into the interview with Dr. Gary Yeoh. If you are an East Harlem stakeholder, whether it be resident, you know, you're in school, you work there, place of worship, et cetera, the East Harlem Collaborative for Community justice is hosting a State of East Harlem Town hall on Wednesday, October 22 at 6pm at El Museo del Barrio. A link to the event will be in the description. For anyone that's interested and wants to attend that the collaborative is a group of individuals and organizations working together on a community driven visioning process for East Harlem. At the town hall, we're hoping to hear from East Harlem residents about both their ideas and concerns for the community. So our goal there is to develop an actionable plan for the community to address as many of the issues as we can. So if you're interested and can be there, check the link in the description.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: With that, we can go ahead and jump into our interview.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: Let's go.
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Yeoh. We're super happy to have you on the podcast and to talk about lots of different things. You have quite a rich background and history of work, so we want to try to touch on those as much as possible.
But before we get too far into some of our questions that we wanted to chat with you about, I just wanted to give you a chance to just bring briefly introduce yourself and just tell us a little bit about your background.
[00:05:01] Speaker C: Thank you. And thank you for finding me. It's a, it's a pleasure to be here. I am a trained economist. I'm retired professor from Wesleyan University.
I've been doing climate work since 1981, believe it or not. That was it was a time when Bill Norhouse phoned me up. He was a dissertation adviser of mine and asked me if I wanted to become engaged in a in a National Academy of Studies panel that was going to write a report called Changing Climate.
I had trained as a as a microeconomic theorist doing decision making under uncertainty, but I had a lot of environmental interests. I told him I didn't know anything about climate change. And he said nobody else does either, at least no very few economists. So it seemed like a good idea.
And after that I moved out of, out of theoretical economics. There's an enormous, enormous amount of low hanging fruit trying to understand what climate change was, what global warming was, what was driving it. Back then we weren't even worried about the impact so much as just pretty much stopping at temperature increases. The science has obviously progressed quite a bit since then and I participated a lot fundamentally that my research became climate change. Worrying about adaptation, worrying about the information required, worrying about the vulnerability of gigantic cost benefit welfare maximization models to try to figure out what to do between now and then and 2100 pretty much very slow moving targets. So spent a lot of time, had to think about this, got into impacts and adaptation, had a model of my own to worry about mitigation policy and the value of impact information. But finally we figured out around 2007 that it wasn't a cost benefit problem, it was a risk management problem. And it wasn't a write at once and be done with it. It was going to be an iterative problem. You had to consider costs and benefits, but you also had to consider equity distribution, unintended consequences, attitudes towards risk, all variety of things like that. But the world was pretty fast to pick that up. And that's how we try to think about how to respond to climate risks.
Up through today we're still approaching it that way and it's a lot easier to conceptualize and communicate. The only problem, as Bill's fond of saying, is that you don't get an answer.
What you get is, is suggestions in the promise of mid course corrections.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Thank you for that. And you've set me up really well with some of your background and talking about some of your work. One of the major questions that we want to try to unpack with you, which I think there's lots of layers to it, is trying to understand this intersection and this framework of understanding the issue of climate change from an economic perspective. And I think if you ask a lot of everyday people, you know, what does climate change have to do with economics and vice versa. You know, if I were to ask my parents that, for example, they'd be like, well, climate change is, you know, costing us a lot and you know, that that trickles down to my, my bills for XYZ or you know, you might ask someone else and they might say they have nothing to do with each other. So I think we're as a, as A country and maybe as a globe, covering all the different perspectives on what, what that actual dynamic is. But you know, as someone who's really thought a lot about this and spends a lot of about climate change from an economic perspective, how would you explain it to someone who doesn't have an academic background or spend as much time in this space to really understand the issue of climate change from economic perspective at kind of a basic level? How are you thinking about the issue of climate change from an economic perspective?
[00:09:12] Speaker C: That's a really, really good question.
But economics fits in at the beginning of the problem.
It's economic activity that drives the demand for energy and different types of energy. It drives therefore the demand for fossil fuels. That's where carbon emissions come from, methane leaks, from distribution of natural gas, all variety of things like that.
Those are the drivers, the fundamental drivers that you can really get your head around.
Economics is also a consumer of an awful lot of the climate science and the impact analysis that realized scientists do the intersection on the driving side, or something called integrated assessment models, they try to bring together the planet and the land systems and things like that, and the economic pressures and worry about how they interact. And at the other end is the consequences of the changing climate. So what, the temperature is getting a little bit warmer? Well, down it is causing this or that or whatever these days it's pretty clear that it's causing an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme events, not causing those events, but making them more likely.
And the consequences have to do with how people respond.
So if you look at the big Picture At a 30,000 foot level, we really have three choices in responding to climate change. One is to abate, that is mitigate reduce emissions of the gases that are driving the temperature increases like carbon dioxide. A second is to adapt, try to look at the risks that's being created by the impacts of this warming planet and how they manifest themselves in economic systems and communities and ecosystems and risks of wildfires and flash floods and things.
The consequences depend a lot on where they are and what humans are doing. And humans have an ability to not only think about reducing emissions, but also thinking about making themselves a little bit more protected. A fundamental lesson that needs to be taken on board and never forgotten is we can't fix this problem. So there will always be, regardless of how much we try, residual consequences. And those are the uprights, tales of the really bad implications and distributions.
So suffering is our third option.
So we have those three possibilities.
And then the economics says, well, we can think about mitigation Abatement that reduces the likelihood of these events and we can think about adaptation that reduces the consequences.
Risk is likelihood times consequence, so we have a handle on the two sources of difficulty. Oh, the other thing I wanted to say. Economists quickly became cognizant of the fact that there are many other ways of measuring impacts and consequences and discurrency, dollars and cents and things.
You can do it and aggregate it in terms of human lives, of morbidity, diseases and things that affect humans, ecosystems, all variety of things like.
And you don't have to quantify them back into dollars and cents. In fact, if you try to do that, you make yourself vulnerable to really good criticism of, say, what's the statistical value of life?
Well, it depends. And really it is. You and I and everybody else are just one person at a time and we should all have equal weight.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: That was a perfect segue. I feel like I couldn't have asked for a better transition to think about this next question and thinking about, you know, anytime you bring up climate change, one of the main questions that comes up is evaluating.
Once you get past the question of like, it is happening and we're seeing that impact in real time in the ways that you described, the next question is, well, okay, well, what do we do about it? And then the following question is, and how do we, how do we know that we're making progress? How do we measure and like, track success and know if we're moving in the right direction? And so one of the things that you just mentioned and thinking about the economic framework and understanding the impacts of climate change is concepts like the value of a statistical life and thinking about who is being impacted and how, and thinking about, well, in a perfect world, if we are making progress. And I'm just coming at it from, I have a background in public health, when I think about it from my public health lens, thinking about, in a perfect world, if we make progress and improvements and are successfully addressing climate change, we're seeing less of some of those impacts in terms of the impact on people's health and well being, less of heat strokes or deaths from flooding, things like that. But when we're opening up this conversation from the economic framework, there's always different measures of success of how we're evaluating our progress and if we're moving in the right direction. So on that note, continuing this framework, how are we currently, or maybe a more mainstream typical economic framework, how would we measure success in terms of how we're making progress on addressing climate change from this economic framework?
[00:14:58] Speaker C: Yeah, especially on the adaptation side, that's been a fundamental question for decades.
It is an economics question. When I was teaching economics, because that's where my home was, in an economics department, I was happy if they graduated with one fundamental insight. The answer to every economics question is it depends.
So the real question is, what does it depend on? You mentioned public health spent some time a while ago, not, not that long ago, five or six years, thinking about the difference between coping with COVID and coping with climate change.
And the epidemiologists do an awful lot of the same sorts of analysis as climate scientists do on what's driving Covid exposure and cases.
So you might think, well, okay, public health can tell us what to measure.
They can measure the economic consequences of the shutdowns and the inflation that was caused by interruptions in supply chains, hospital costs, cases, how it's distributed across populations, also deaths. And they can measure those in a time frame that makes some sense. In climate, you're making investments in adaptation and even in mitigation that require investments in the near term for which the benefits and good news is delayed long into the future. And so you can anticipate what's going to happen. You can recognize that it's not going to fix the problem, but you can't really measure it in the same way you could measure, well, when masks came on, cases went down significantly. When the vaccine vaccines showed up, there's a little bit of delay, but populations got to herd immunity and cases and deaths slowed down. And that happened within a year or two, something like that. And you can measure it. You could do counterfactual experiments with your models.
At the very beginning, people were measuring what was the effect of delaying two weeks or three weeks to impose mask requirements.
And you can measure those in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of cases and certainly tens of thousands of lives. But you can't really do that with climate change.
What you're stuck with is models and very careful thought that says, how do we think about what the future is? It's uncertain.
How do we bring that into the risk calculation to inform adaptation strategies?
How frequently should you iterate?
So a really good question, rather than how much progress can we measure is how much. What should we measure over the next 20 years that will tell us how we're doing and where we're falling down? And what's the sources of the problems? And is the problem bigger or smaller than it was 20 years ago?
[00:18:23] Speaker B: That's a helpful way to think about it in terms of, in a relational way, like measuring at different, you know, kind of these time points and understanding is it. Is it better or worse than it was at this. At this previous time point? And I think that I appreciate the analogy to the situation with COVID because I think for a lot of people, that's still, you know, even though it's. We're a few years away from that, it's still really fresh in a lot of people's minds. And that having that concrete example of how we measure and understand what's happening with COVID and comparing that with how we measure and understand climate change, I think maybe resonates with some folks circling back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of measuring, but also specific metrics, circling back to this term value of a statistical life. You alluded to the fact that there's maybe some challenges and problems with a term like that and how we think about an issue like that, climate change and the impact on human lives and the way that we tie that to monetary value so we act. We're always thinking about issues in terms of the equitable distribution of the impact. So when you put a power plant in a city, where in that city is that going to go? And then what does that mean in terms of who's being impacted and who's maybe being bearing a greater burden relative to the general population? And so as a part of that, we're thinking about it through the equity lens. So I'm curious, thinking about terms and concepts like a value of a statistical life and just kind of that economic framework in general and trying to quantify the impacts of climate change.
How do you think that we could do a better job of embedding equity in. Into how we think about climate change and climate policy from that economic perspective?
[00:20:14] Speaker C: There are a number of dimensions to my answer, but let me just state from the beginning, I think the value of a statistical life is an immoral approach to a fundamental problem, not just with respect to climate risks, but with respect to all sorts of things.
And I think that, that being said, how do we. How do we think about it?
In the beginning of this century, economists and social scientists and epidemiologists working on the third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came up with a concept of adaptive capacity.
And then the economics question was, well, what does that depend on? And we worked through the literature and found about seven or eight underlying determinants of the capacity to adapt, starting with availability of financial resources, also the availability of actual actions that you could undertake.
But then there was human capital understanding. There is social capital, community support and integration of all sorts of communities and individuals and decision making units all the way up to the state and federal and global levels. There was educational capital, human capital.
How much, how well do we understand, how well can we communicate to the general population the complexities of things that leads to the availability of leadership with an open mind and skills to be able to separate the signal of a vulnerability, source of a vulnerability, and the noise.
And then there has to be public trust of the science that that informs those people and those people that they're not corrupt. And a variety of things like that. And all of those get you down to people specific or community specific or state specific characteristics.
And that's, I think, really, really important.
If there are no available responses, adaptive capacity is the, is zero.
If there are responses but there aren't resources to be able to take advantage of those, then adaptive capacity is really low.
If individuals are so concerned about their personal security and worrying about where the next meal is coming from or where they're going to live, or how they're going to pay for their health insurance when the price triples, variety of things like that, they don't have time or do they have the inclination, nor is it really suitable to expect that they would worry about things like climate change and climate policy. They're worried about those sorts of things. And one of the things we fiddled with that concept and one of the major things we said is one, good climate policy is good social policy.
Especially when the reasons for concern consider explicitly distributional impacts measured in deaths of humans or economics or anything like that. It's important that it be able to be aggregated. But those are there. So that's one connection. The other connection is that social policy that improves the personal security of individuals is good climate policy because it increases the adaptive capacity to climate risks. And it also allows people to spend some more time thinking about something whose impacts extend well beyond them and they can begin to try to take that seriously. So that's what came out of the ipcc and there was a lot of work after that.
And one of the fundamental conclusions was that you have these seven or eight determinants, but the overall level of adaptive capacity is not supported by all of them equally. In fact, the dominant one is the weakest one. Because if you're very, very weak in one of those determinants, you really have low adaptive capacity. Even if you have really, really bright people who can process statistics and trust in them that they're doing things, if they can't come up with the money, or there's really nothing to do, then adaptation is nearly impossible. One last thing, recognizing the community that you're talking about leads you to different sorts of adaptive strategies.
You could think about protecting coastlines, but I learned a story a number of years ago about monsoon rains and floods in the Indian subcontinent. Historically and regularly, large monsoons would cause large floods and tens of thousands of people would die. But if you looked at why that was the case and how to protect them, build big dikes and levees along the river, well, what puts. What makes them vulnerable, what made them vulnerable is that they did not want to leave their livestock.
And so they would stay to try to protect their livestock, and the livestock and the people would die. And so the solution that people came up with is, well, let's find some high ground, let's make it public land, let's put a fence around it, and when a monsoon is coming, let's allow everybody to bring their animals to that place where need some food, they will be relatively safe. And then the people can go to higher ground.
And after they started doing that, 10,000 deaths became 100 deaths.
And that was measurable.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Okay, Yeah, I appreciate that.
I always appreciate when we can ground it in a story. And that really does illustrate your point of kind of capturing what it looks, what adaptive capacity looks like. But then thinking about it from that social perspective perspective, how do we address this need, but think about the needs of the community, this collective need? Once we understand what the crux of the problem is, why folks are not wanting to leave, then how can we come up with a collective social solution that works for everyone, so that then you can have the appropriate response to get to a safer place, et cetera, have a better response and protect people's lives? One of the major reasons that we're doing so much work around, you know, addressing the impacts of climate change, is because we know that the impacts will land on the most vulnerable populations and that we're already seeing that, and that that is reason enough alone to really take accelerated and significant action to try to curve that as much as possible.
So I appreciate you kind of highlighting that.
[00:27:55] Speaker C: Let me take 30 seconds to put a concluding sentence at the end of the last conversation.
Ipcc, climate change is not a reason to worry about environmental justice.
Environmental justice is a reason to worry about climate change.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: I like that. I appreciate you summing that up very concisely and appreciate lots of your thoughts and perspectives in our conversation so far.
Thank you again for making time to have this conversation with us.
[00:28:30] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. If you like this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts about the show or suggestions for topics you want to discuss, we encourage you to reach out to
[email protected] I also want to remind
[00:28:43] Speaker B: folks about our Uptown Chats hotline, where listeners can call in with questions they have about climate and environmental justice.
Got a question? Call 877-Uptown 6. That's 877-878-6966. Give us a call.
[00:29:00] Speaker A: Check out we act on Facebook @weact4ej. That's W E a C T F O R E J on Instagram, Blue sky and YouTube on WeAct4EJ. That's W E A C T number 4EJ. And check out our website weact.org for more information about environmental justice.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: This until next time, Bye.
