The commercial real estate finance industry is facing substantial challenges due to climate change, particularly with respect to extreme flooding. As flood events continue to occur more frequently and with greater severity across the US, the role of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—and its administration of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and

In an effort to advance the conversation around climate change within the CRE finance community, Jason S. Rozes and Nitya Kumar Goyal recently published Climate Change Impact on Commercial Real Estate Finance — What the Industry Needs to Know Today, which provides a great foundation for understanding how climate change affects our industry and

God help me, I’m finally writing about climate change.  This commentary assiduously avoids the obviously political (we take the view that complaining about and belittling our elected representatives and the permanent bureaucracy for doing boneheaded things is entirely apolitical).  And while even the phrase “climate change” carries with it a certain frisson of a capital “P” political debate, this is not that.  So, please, don’t ball this missive up, toss it away and cancel your subscription to Crunched Credit if you’re (A) not a fully-enrolled initiate in the Green Revolution, or indeed, even, if you are someone who thinks that the threat of climate change is somewhat… overblown (I’m not even going to think about using the term “climate denier”) or (B) someone who thinks climate change is real but simply throws your arms up in frustration over the possibility of finding a possibly affordable fix.

In either of those cases, I expect your default response to climate change talk is simply to move on to something more actionable in your professional life and I’m going to suggest here why you shouldn’t do that.  We need to start paying more attention than I have paid to date.Continue Reading Commercial Real Estate and Climate Change