Capital, Cities, Carbon: YSE Experts Preview Climate Week NYC

From incorporating natural resources into GDP to building sustainable cities to strengthening drivers of carbon removal, Yale School of the Environment faculty and alumni will be discussing how long-term climate goals can translate into scalable, deployable solutions at Yale @ Climate Week NYC.

The annual summit, hosted by Yale Planetary Solutions, brings together government, business, academic, and NGO leaders working to put climate solutions into practice. It will take place at the Yale Club in New York City September 21-22 with faculty and alumni also participating in events across the city. 

Ahead of this year’s Climate Week NYC, YSE News spoke with faculty members and alumni about what it takes to pursue climate goals as the landscape around them grows more complicated. 

Creating a climate safety net

Q. As extreme weather increasingly disrupts food security, water access, and livelihoods, how is this shaping global climate migration patterns, and how should policymakers be preparing?

Brianna Castro, assistant professor of urban sustainability

The image most people carry of climate migration is a wave — large numbers of people moving at once, from hot places to cooler ones, from South to North. That image is one very small part of the full picture of climate migration. 

Migration, when it happens, is usually at the end of a long, exhausting process of adapting in place rather than an early response to climate change. Moving takes savings, documents, a network on the other end, and someone willing to rent to you.  For policymakers, that means treating migration less as the crisis to be managed and more as a signal that something upstream has already failed. What’s missing is what I call a Climate Safety Net: an institutional layer of physical infrastructure, policy relief, and social support that helps a household manage climate stress without liquidating its assets — buyouts offered before a disaster instead of after, relief that doesn’t hinge on documentation status, portable benefits, and housing investment where people are actually going, in addition to protection where they are. We need to be anticipating climate impacts rather than responding to them.

What GDP misses

Q. The United Nations has called for a move “Beyond GDP” to better measure progress, sustainability, and well-being. Why is it important to include natural resources to assess a country’s overall well-being and natural security?

Eli Fenichel, Knobloch Family Professor of Natural Resource Economics

GDP measures what we make, what we consume, what we save, and how we trade. It ignores what we start with — our natural resources. Yet, the availability of oil, critical minerals, timber, access to clean water and air, fish, and outdoor places to recreate underpin what we can make and how we feel about the quality of lives. 

The output and the fiscal condition of a country can depend on changing natural resource stocks, the state of the environment, and education and health levels in ways not well captured in GDP. This matters for long-term fiscal planning and for understanding an economy's productivity broadly. The first step to moving beyond GDP is to account for the natural resources we are lucky enough not to have had to make ourselves. Many of our geopolitical tensions as well as natural disasters involve this set of resources. Yet, we almost systematically omit these dependences from our economic measurement systems. Correcting that is one important step in going Beyond GDP.  Measuring these resources is also essential to determining whether our societies are on a sustainable path.

Urban design rooted in nature

Q. Urban areas are responsible for 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but they also hold the key to reducing emissions. How important is prioritizing nature in urban design and development?

Karen Seto, Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science

Nature Based Solutions (NBS) in cities are low-cost solutions that deliver multiple benefits including to human mental and physical health, the economy, shading, cooling, stormwater management, among many things. That said, they are long-game solutions. It takes years for trees to grow into an urban canopy to provide shade. As such, they should be part of the urban climate solutions portfolio but not the only tool in their toolkit. New Haven is a fantastic example of a small U.S. city making progress on increasing canopy cover and also using bioswales. Berlin and Paris are good examples of larger European cities embracing NBS.

Q. Pollution, climate change, and habitat loss have pushed a million plant and animal species to the brink of extinction. In the past 50 years, there’s been a 73% decline in monitored wildlife populations. How does habitat protection in urban spaces promote biodiversity and improve health for all inhabitants?

Gabriel Gadsden ’26 PhD, Thomas Lovejoy Conservation Fellow at the University of Arizona

Habitat loss ultimately affects all urban inhabitants because people depend on countless ecological services, many of which often go unnoticed. Access to birds and birdsong has been linked to improved mental health and restorative cognition, helping people recover from stress and attention fatigue. Healthy soils, urban vegetation, pollinators, and diverse microbial communities regulate water, cycle nutrients, improve air quality, moderate urban heat, and support the ecological processes that make cities livable.

Redesigning the urban realm requires moving beyond the idea that nature and cities are separate — this begins with frameworks such as One Health, co-benefits approaches, and socially responsible design, which recognize that human health, environmental health, and economic resilience are deeply interconnected. In practice, this could range from grassroots efforts that transform vacant lots into community gardens and wildlife habitats, to large-scale public investments in green infrastructure and biodiversity-sensitive urban planning. The goal is not simply to make cities greener, but to create urban landscapes that consider the needs of all inhabitants — human and non-human alike.

Incentive-driven climate solutions

Q. Since funding for carbon removal alone often falls short, what factors can drive nature-based climate solutions to scale?

Sara Kuebbing, Assistant professor of temperate forest resilience

Peter Raymond, Oastler Professor of Biogeochemistry

Kuebbing: Ecosystems provide a range of services that benefit people, including but not limited to cleaning water and air, providing food and fiber, and improving human health. However, measuring and tracking these benefits can sometimes be challenging, which might limit investment in activities that protect and promote these services. Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program researchers are collaborating with faculty at the Yale School of Public Health to develop methods and tools that could track direct human health benefits that arise from deployment of natural-climate solutions such as reforestation, reduced on-field burning, and mangrove restoration.

Raymond: A large focus within the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) field right now is looking for solutions that can lead to a billion tons of CO2 removal. Co-drivers are attributes of a CDR solution that might help get it to scale and adoption by primary stakeholders, such as greater crop yields. Co-benefits include biodiversity or clean water. By focusing on carbon dioxide removal solutions that have co-benefits, you have a win-win situation.

Powering sustainable AI

Q. How do you weigh the environmental cost of expanding AI infrastructure — water use, strain on the power grid — against the investment needed to keep energy clean and reliable?

Harshit Agrawal ’26 MEM/MBA Venture Investor, Connecticut Innovations

The capital needed to scale AI and the capital needed to manage its water, power, and grid impacts are no longer entirely separate budgets. They are increasingly the same infrastructure investment. Today, if a data center developer cannot secure reliable power, manage water use, or obtain community and regulatory support, it cannot scale in the first place.

Two forces are driving that shift: scarcity and regulation. Scarcity is currently the more immediate constraint — in many markets, electricity capacity, transmission access, and water availability are limited, creating a direct business incentive for data centers to invest in efficient cooling, water recycling, flexible load, new generation, and grid upgrades. Regulation reinforces that commercial logic: tariffs, interconnection rules, and state or local permitting can require clean-energy procurement, water management, or contributions to grid modernization costs, and public and political scrutiny can affect permitting timelines and the social license to operate.

Natural gas can be the fastest way to secure firm power for a large AI load, but it is also a long-term financial risk because it creates exposure to fuel-price volatility, emission regulations, permitting and community opposition, and potential stranded-asset risk. The trend in the industry currently is to secure gas-powered sites for the data centers today and also keep working on the more durable strategy on clean firm resources such as nuclear, geothermal, and long-duration storage, complemented by wind and solar. This maintains the ability to scale quickly and remain competitive while directing long-lived infrastructure investment toward lower-risk, sustainable power solutions.