Be calm without this storm.
The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season has produced nine named storms through early October, including 4 hurricanes.
For the first time in 10 years, no hurricane made landfall in the continental US during September.
This is sure to provide relief to America's struggling homeowners and property insurance markets.
Nature-based climate solutions may help create more September without severe storms.
These approaches leverage natural processes to capture carbon.
And also enhance resilience, and they do represent a crucial strategy for both mitigation and adaptation in the global fight against climate change.
Well, joining me here at the New York Stock Exchange is Jeff Gitterman, managing director of Ergon Wealth Management.
Jeff, welcome.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Well, 3 more months left until the end of this year.
So while we're continuing to keep an eye on storms in the Atlantic, tell us exactly what nature-based solutions are.
Yeah, so if we take it a step back, economics really looks at inputs and outputs.
So we put something into a system like fossil fuels, we get out energy and heat.
It doesn't look at any kind of circular view of that.
So what Nature Based Solutions attempts to do is look at everything more as a system.
And not only what are we putting in, but when we put in something into the system, what are we extracting out of the system, and when we get something out an output, are we getting negative outputs as well as positive outputs so we look at everything more circularly.
Mangroves is probably the easiest example to cover on that because climate change is depleting our mangroves around our coastline.
When we deplete our mangroves around our coastline, we get more waves coming onto the shoreline and more high tide coming onto the shoreline.
That damages.
Property, it allows those swells to come in much quicker.
It messes with the biosphere that is around the shoreline, so it affects fishing.
It affects diving and local tourism.
So all of a sudden when you look at the negative impacts of climate change around nature.
Unless we start quantifying it as what is the cost to the economics, we're not going to address the issues unfortunately we're just not wired that way to think about the whole system.
We're just wired to think about what is in it for us, basically, unfortunately.
Yeah, and when you talk about inputs as well as outputs, nature has its own timeline, correct?
So when we're talking about some of these nature-based solutions, including mangroves, what are we talking about in terms of timeline?
I mean, you can regrow mangroves pretty quickly.
So while they're depleting very rapidly because of acidification in the ocean and warming waters.
There's a lot we can do to actually replant and regrow mangroves.
It's the same thing with corals.
Coral reefs are a great example.
When we think about the depletion of coral reefs also because of temperatures and acidification, what we don't think about is what does that do to tourism?
I mean, people go to the Barrier Reef all the time for scuba diving just to see.
Those coral reefs, those coral reefs aren't there, and we think about the impact to tourism in Australia, all of a sudden the impact is a lot more credible for people to want to spend money to fix the problem.
We just haven't been thinking about the solutions in an economic way.
We've had a lot of people saying we can't destroy nature, we can't destroy nature.
I mean we.
The most alarming stat I think I've ever heard is only 1% of all the species ever alive on planet Earth exists today, which means we wiped out 99% of the species that have existed before today.
We don't think about that because we're still here and we're Making money and we still have a job, but if all of a sudden you start seeing actual data that says your job is in jeopardy if this part of nature isn't there anymore, then the will to actually put in the economics to address it changes dramatically.
Yeah, Jeff, those are some staggering statistics there and a point of concern.
But when we're talking about nature-based solutions, where are they actually being implemented right now?
I mean, we're doing a lot around mangrove development in the coast of Florida.
There's the governor of Virginia, even though he's kind of an anti-climate change guy, he's having a lot of coastal issues, so he's looking at coastal.
We're doing barrier reefs outside of New York City, just traditional.
Engineering Stantec is the company that's building parks beyond Battery Park, beyond the existing coastline to be able to absorb more of that, and we're using nature in planting and in the coastline to actually buffer those coastal zones and protect New York City.
So it's happening all over.
It isn't always called climate adaptation or climate resilience.
Sometimes it's just called building.
But if we're building properly with nature in mind, it actually goes a lot towards protecting not only the economics but also the social equity environment for people that are living in those areas.
So there's huge benefits all around.
We just need to do a much better job in communicating the benefits of investing in nature because it is very net positive for humans to be investing in nature-based solutions.
Yeah, and finally.
Jeff, we have about 60 seconds here, so I understand that you are not a meteorologist, but the fact that no hurricanes have made landfall in September of this year, and this is the 1st September in over a decade, what do you make of this?
I mean, it has more to do with the wind currents actually coming from Sahara than it does with the warming in the ocean.
So the oceans are getting warmer, the temperatures are getting warmer.
That allows for a much more rainstorms. had a lot more issues with tropical rainstorms that have been devastating in the US because of the amount of moisture that air can carry, but hurricane development is, it's a nature-based problem.
It's not a local problem.
It's the whole globe contributes to local hurricane systems.
OK, Jeff, always wonderful to talk with you.
Thank you so much for shedding light on this important topic and help us understand this.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you.
