by Doug Lashley (GreenVest President & CEO) | March 16, 2020
The impacts of changing meteorological conditions and rising tides can no longer be talked about as a future challenge. Every day across the country communities are being ravaged at an alarming rate with the impacts of increasingly severe weather. 93% of these unrelenting conditions impact our water resources from damaging erosion and flooding to altered water flows and changing weather patterns.
With the frequency and intensity of climate-related extreme weather events on the rise, there are significant cost implications to how we manage water resources and their associated infrastructure.
We are also not ignoring the fact that life and limb are at risk. In our own backyard, the Chesapeake Bay region has seen deaths from raging waters and billions of dollars in property losses. One community has experienced one 500 year and two 100 year storms within 2.5 years. This is unprecedented. The time is now to implement climate-resilient planning to secure a future.
GreenVest works with utilities, government agencies and private industry to introduce innovative practices to start and help build climate resilience now and for future generations.
These practices can help spotlight restoration solutions that are being woven into the fabrics of towns and cities. These solutions use the best available science to establish planning tools and implement robust emergency management plans, as well as infrastructure retrofits needed to assure a more resilient future.
But ensuring an effective and equitable resiliency planning process involves looking beyond restoration solutions. Leaders are also taking the incremental steps necessary to make sure we have the rules, regulations and policies to strengthen collaboration and sustain funding for action in between extreme events. This involves looking beyond physical infrastructure and focusing on the relationships upon which communities are built.
Wall Street is also having a significant influence on how these issues should be addressed. Analysts look more favorably on public companies that take their environment record seriously and have adopted a form of Environmental Social Governance (ESG) that is actually practiced and not just talked about. Some large institutional investors like BlackRock Inc., State Street Corp. and Vanguard are making it clear that for them to invest in companies they have to establish their platform for real progress in the ESG arena. This has also filtered down to the shareholder, Board of Director and the employee level of companies that are voicing a real preference for their companies to do more than what is required in permits that govern their operations.
GreenVest is advancing some breakthrough revenue generating approaches that involve the beneficial and resilient reuse of underutilized properties whether owned by private industry, government agencies, local/public holdings or even nonprofit organizations. There is a dual purpose and benefit — solving environmental issues while generating profits. Many of these practices can help solve a variety of sins.
In short, Greenvest is leading the cause for resiliency planning in the region and encourage all to learn, grow and succeed with us. Sound interesting? Let’s explore the possibilities of a thoughtful collaboration to define our successful future.
