Matthew Eby

From flooding and wildfires to extreme heat and air quality, climate risks are increasingly front-and-center for homebuyers. And now there is an easy way to evaluate this concern, thanks to Matthew Eby, CEO of First Street Foundation, which provides climate risk modeling. The organization’s data is used by Redfin, Relator.com, and as announced this October, Zillow—the most popular property browsing website in the U.S. By the end of the year, visitors to Zillow will be able to browse an interactive map that color-codes a variety of climate risks that may affect homes for sale.

What is the single most important action you think the public, or a specific company or government (other than your own), needs to take in the next year to advance the climate agenda?

Disclosure. The single most important action that any government could take this year is to ensure that every person, community, business, and agency knows their level of risk from climate change by mandating climate related financial disclosures. 

This requires that the information and data describing that risk is widely available, is understandable to all, and if useful in driving decisions. This information must be highly specific for the location of interest, and should go beyond the physical description of risk to economic or health outcomes. 

If we are able to do that, we are able to take the amorphis issue of greenhouse gasses and 1 degree of warming and turn it into a dollars and cents issue, a today issue. Humans react to rational incentives and when we are able to put a price on inaction, the solutions become a lot more palatable.

What's the most important climate legislation that could pass in the next year?

Permitting reform. Experts predict that we’ll need at least 10,000 new clean energy projects within this decade alone. And each of these projects will need permits to get built.

Unfortunately, permitting is the biggest issue getting in the way of us achieving this critical outcome. 

Take the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), for example. NEPA requires developers to assess the environmental impact of their projects. While it serves an important purpose, it was enacted before more recent environmental regulations, like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, which have since introduced stringent environmental standards.

Each of these laws is important, but together they often lead to lengthy, complex permit reviews that can require thousands of pages of analysis and sign-offs from numerous agencies. This doesn’t even account for additional state and local regulations. While this system may have worked decades ago, today’s demand for clean energy calls for a more streamlined approach.

As we consider the scale of new projects needed, balancing speed and safety is essential. The U.S. needs a more predictable permitting process to allow us to achieve the clean energy future we all desire.

If you could stand up and talk to world leaders at the next U.N. climate conference, what would you say?

“We borrow the earth from our children” is a quote that has always resonated with me and one we all need to take to heart. 

The earth science community, including the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Climate Research Programme, has done a remarkable job in giving us the tools to understand how climate will change over the next 30 to 100 years. It is now our responsibility and challenge to translate those physical manifestations of climate change into climate risk, and to quantify those risks for every individual, every business, every community, and every nation so that we can understand the socioeconomic implications of that risk to be able to take appropriate action. What gets measured gets managed. 

To do so, we must learn to work at highly specific scales, right down to individual homes and businesses, and develop new types of models that will project the changes to which our societies and economies will need to adapt. And then, realizing the costs of those changes, we must immediately work to reduce the amount of carbon emitted into our atmosphere so that we can avoid those ever-increasing costs in future years. How do we do this? We need a partnership between the public and private sectors to produce the information and data products rapidly—this is a global emergency and will not be solved by any one sector alone. 

With the right data, we can solve this together.