[Cathy] Thank you, Your Holiness, Eminences, Excellencies, and dignitaries. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve on the Advisory Committee for this important summit. And it is a pleasure to speak with you all today.
As many of you have been saying throughout this summit, my husband Jim and I firmly believe that we will not make progress in our work towards a climate resilient future without recognizing two undisputable facts: first, that climate change is inexorably linked to inequality, and second, that making progress on climate change requires working collaboratively across the lines that so often divide us – lines that separate disciplines, sectors, cultures, political parties, nations and more.
Our Foundation, the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation, is committed to building a more knowledgeable and inclusive society, with a special emphasis on environmental sustainability and the mitigation of wealth inequality.
During our talk today, Jim will share some brief thoughts about the connections between climate change and wealth inequality and then I will share some of the ways we believe philanthropy can be a catalyst for change.
First, Jim.
[Jim] It is certainly no surprise that the heft of the conversation about the dangers of climate change is focused on its direct physical threats: drought, flooding, human and animal habitat disruption, and the like. I will use my brief time today to try to examine yet another, less discussed, threat I urge you to take seriously: the vicious cycle arising between climate change and wealth inequality. As context, let me explain that Cathy and I agreed some years ago that, for maximum impact, our philanthropy should be tightly targeted, like a laser, not a flood lamp. We each picked a single issue around which to center the bulk of our giving. Cathy’s choice was sustainability and bio-diversity. My choice was unequal wealth concentration. I spoke in this same Pontifical forum two years ago about the various harms – moral, economic, and political – that arise from excessive wealth inequalities and about the accelerating trend toward increased inequality evident around the world today.
I haven’t time today for a recounting of all the damage that the tightening grip on financial means by a small fraction of the population can reap. Let me only say that extreme wealth concentration runs roughshod over our better instincts for justice, compassion, and decency; it can render democracy an essentially empty fiction; and it can stultify economies. Rather than document these assertions once again, I will use my few minutes to argue the case that climate change is amplifying the already ugly trend toward wealth sequestration at the top and, further, that exaggerated concentration of wealth in turn hampers our ability to restrain climate change.
The first of these twin assertions is straightforward. The injuries of climate change fall unequally among economic strata within societies and all the more unequally among nations. It should be apparent that arid soil, intensifying winds, unhealthy extremes of heat, contraction of grazing lands, and invasive diseases are affecting tropical nations more than those in more temperate zones. Countries in the Global South, already poorer those in the North, have contributed the least to the sources of climate change yet they are suffering the most, and they are the least equipped to pay for required preparation and adaptation. Even with today’s enhanced consciousness, the global most privileged 1% are still responsible for more emissions than the entire bottom half of the world’s population. Justice surely requires that the wealthier nations that have brought us to this point aid those poorer nations to adapt – without asking them to sacrifice their own paths to economic betterment.
Within national boundaries the greatest pain of climate change also falls plainly upon those least able to bear it. Scholarship now suggests that harmful emission-related inequalities within nations are even greater than those between nations. Poor neighborhoods easily become unprotected neighborhoods. The wealthy have vastly disproportionate access to air conditioning relief when temperatures become unhealthy, to foods that become scarce or expensive, to second homes, and to employment in comfortable offices. And we must take great care not to impose solutions for warming trends that tilt the costs even more toward the least financially secure. As an example, I am happy to see that solutions such as carbon taxes, although quite promising in many respects, are now being subjected to examination for their distributive economic effects. Adaptive responses may need to be coupled with redistributive policies if they are to pass political and ethical muster.
Looking at this in the reverse direction, the reasons that wealth inequalities accelerate climate change are only slightly more subtle. As wealth becomes more concentrated, and the most fortunate few insulate themselves from the adverse effects of climate, their empathy for everyone else may well diminish. Lack of common experience always tends to reduce willingness to endure even modest sacrifice. Climate isolationism appears to be on the rise even now. Inequalities of means also shift political power to elites, oligarchs, and neo-aristocrats. The loss by degree of pluralistic influence over societal policies is a near-certain negative for climate justice. Unfortunately, though, we are witnessing a worldwide acceleration in the flow of wealth toward to the top, accompanied by a decline in the willingness to accept progressive taxes for the financing of common goals, and a near complete rejection of estate taxes in the world’s leading economies. These trends can only diminish the cooperative efforts necessary to secure resiliency.
None of the central issues raised at this conference, including the corollary issue I have touched on, is not easy to solve – which brings me back to Cathy’s and my approach to philanthropy. Wise and practical answers to the hardest questions surrounding environment and optimal wealth distribution remain elusive. While philanthropists cannot afford to pay for the physical protections our planet needs, we can certainly help finance the academic work required to show us the best approaches. So Cathy and I have aimed our giving at universities where the world’s top scholars are seeking the wisest paths to a healthier climate and sounder distributional economics. In addition to the projects Cathy has addressed, we have created eleven university centers dedicated to the study of wealth concentration – six centers within the United States and five in other countries – and there will be more. We have charged these Stone Centers with training a generation of scholars to tackle the essential questions around merging prosperity, resiliency and distributive justice. Few accomplishments would make us happier than to feel that our sponsorship encouraged the development of a roadmap for breaking the vicious cycle afflicting climate and wealth concentration. And at that let me stop and pass the microphone back to Cathy.
[Cathy] Thank you, Jim. When we decided, years ago, that we would establish a philanthropic foundation, we could not have predicted how closely connected our two primary areas of interest would be. Preparing our world for the impacts of climate change – while simultaneously working to reduce inequality and halt emissions – is indeed one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Today, I want to emphasize that we will not make progress if we continue to work within the silos that so often divide us. That is why I am so pleased to see the audience here includes individuals representing governments, NGOs, religious institutions, corporations, philanthropies, universities, and more. Looking around, I also see diversity in our academic backgrounds – we are social scientists, natural scientists, legal experts, engineers, public health professionals, doctors and philosophers. This diversity of thought is extremely important as it is going to take creative minds from all backgrounds, working together, to address this crisis for our planet.
As Jim mentioned, there are no easy answers to the challenges we face. If we knew all the right policies to implement, we would happily devote our time and resources to advocacy. As a foundation, our objectives in the area of adaptation are clear – help prepare our world for the consequences of climate change in a manner that protects people, ecosystems, and habitats with the least disruption to neighborhoods, cultural resources, and livelihoods. But how can we do this when the seas and temperatures are rising far more quickly than we ever thought possible? And when we live in a world where the neighborhoods and nations least able to pay for adaptation are the ones that face the most risk? The cost of adapting our world will be far greater than anything we have witnessed in modern times, but the cost of not adapting our world will be nothing short of catastrophic.
So what can philanthropy do?
First, philanthropy can encourage risk taking. We need to be willing to try new approaches and invest in innovation. Some ideas won’t work and some projects will fail, but we won’t make progress if we don’t embrace risk. We need to get comfortable with supporting early-stage projects that may not yet have proof of concept. Some exciting ideas I’ve learned about recently include augmenting barrier islands or even building new ones, establishing sponge cities, creating eco-reefs, and developing green seawalls that can absorb wave energy while also cleaning the water and enhancing habitat. These are just a few of the concepts that we need to continue testing in a variety of real-world settings to see how they perform.
Second, philanthropy can help develop policies that will enable more capital to be available for resiliency and adaptation. It is not enough to create the solutions, we also need to know how we will pay for them. The upfront costs of adaptation are enormous and we must make progress towards quantifying the savings and loss prevention over time.
We can learn from organizations like Boston-based Social Finance which is pioneering new ways to complement philanthropy and government spending by developing investment opportunities that deliver positive change in our society.
And we can learn from governments and NGOs that are experimenting with resiliency banks that issue green bonds, loans and grants to finance resiliency projects. The state of Massachusetts and the City of Boston are leading the way by elevating climate to the very highest levels of government. Under Governor Healey, Massachusetts established the nation’s very first state climate chief as well as the country’s first green bank dedicated to affordable housing. Under Boston’s Mayor Wu, the city appointed its first ever Chief Climate Officer as well as an ambitious green new deal.
Third, philanthropy can incentivize partnerships. Foundations and donors can be nimble with their funding and can serve as the connective tissue that gets multiple sectors rowing in the same direction. Unlike governments, universities and large corporations, which often have complex bureaucracies to navigate, philanthropies have the ability to act quickly and can require partnership as a condition to funding.
Our Foundation embraced these values when it worked to co-develop the Stone Living Lab headquartered in Boston Massachusetts. The Lab is a partnership of the University of Massachusetts Boston; the NGO Boston Harbor Now, the City of Boston’s Environment Department; the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation; the Massachusetts Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs; the National Park Service; and the Massachusetts Tribe at Ponkapoag.
The Living Lab was established to test and scale nature-based approaches to coastal resiliency in and around Boston Harbor while engaging in place-based climate education and community focused research in collaboration with local municipalities and NGOs.
As of today, the Lab has several projects, each of which has been co-developed with practitioners. One currently underway compares the performance of cobble berms, also known as dynamic revetments. For this project, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management partnered with the Stone Living Lab to evaluate the effectiveness and ecological impacts of cobble berms as nature-based solutions for coastal resilience. By comparing performance across six different sites, the Lab is gaining a deeper understanding of how these nature-based approaches function as well as the co-benefits they provide habitats and communities.
Another project designed in partnership with the City of Boston monitors the real-time impact of storms on neighborhoods across the City. The City of Boston’s “Coastal Resilience Solutions” plans include over 70 climate adaptation projects totaling approximately $3 billion to be implemented within the next 20 years to prepare the City for sea-level rise and coastal storms. The Lab’s real-time flood observations project is designed to help city managers improve storm models, understand exactly where flooding occurs, and make informed decisions about future resiliency planning. Better models mean more accurate predictions regarding the streets and neighborhoods that are most at risk. Just this past January Boston experienced a significant storm event that caused flooding throughout the city. During the storm, the late morning high tide was the fourth highest water level ever recorded in Boston Harbor. Our overland flood stations recorded 3.4 feet of flooding in one of Boston’s most under-resourced neighborhoods. City officials are already incorporating this data into their resiliency planning and we will expand these monitoring capabilities to other municipalities in the near future.
The last project I will tell you about is a collaboration with Living Seawalls, a new evidence-based solution developed by the Sydney Institute of Marine Sciences. We first learned about Living Seawalls when Boston served as the host city for the prestigious Earthshot Prize. Living Seawalls panels, when placed on hard seawalls in urban coastal waters, are examples of effective green infrastructure that have been proven to increase habitat and water quality. This spring, when we install over 200 panels at two different Boston locations, it will be the first time Living Seawalls are installed as part of a controlled experiment in North American waters.
The Stone Living Lab was borne out of a local challenge – the Boston area is predicted to experience some of the most severe sea level rise in the world. The water in our harbor is eight inches higher than it was in 1950 and is now rising by approximately one inch every eight years. As a response, we have demonstrated that philanthropy can serve as a catalyst to bring academia and the NGO sector into close collaboration with all levels of government.
As the Holy Father has written so eloquently, “our responses” to the climate crisis “have not been adequate while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.”
Philanthropy must take bold action. We don’t have the luxury of time. But we also cannot fall victim to despair. We must redouble our efforts to take risks, prioritize partnerships, and work with colleagues from diverse cultures, disciplines and nationalities as we spur innovation and address what is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of our lifetime – building a more just and resilient world.
Thank you.