Financial agendas centering on the global fight against climate change have increasingly turned to cities and urban re/development projects as ideal candidates for supposedly ‘future proof’ investment. In the last decade, research has witnessed the development of policy programs, risk assessments, and project pipelines, amongst other efforts to materialize this agenda in the city. Drawing on critical urban geographies of what is loosely known as ‘climate finance’, this Special Feature, ‘Decentering Urban Climate Finance’, proposes to expand and provincialize these dominant agendas. The five contributions in this Special Feature employ the notion of decentering in four distinct ways: by putting a broader range of theoretical lenses to use and rereading the workings of climate finance through them; by highlighting the modes of omission through which dominant understandings of climate finance narrow its operations to a limited set of solutions, approaches, places, and imaginaries; by turning a view onto under-examined sites of finance and climate adaptation; and by imagining alternative transformative imaginaries of urban climate finance.@en

Understandings of climate finance are in flux today in politically urgent ways, posing timely questions for critical urban scholarship and practice. The term climate finance came prominently into use as a point of contention in United Nations Conference of Parties (COP) debates over the last decade. It was employed in calls upon wealthy countries to dedicate funding to support climate change responses in the Global South—recognizing that many countries who have contributed least to the climate crisis now stand to suffer most from its impacts. Climate finance is also a growing priority for multilateral and bilateral development funders. However, governmental and multilateral channels of climate finance have persistently failed to meet pledged and called-for commitments, let alone address the more significant climate financing gap facing communities worldwide, or the even higher tally suggested by more transformative understandings of climate/ecological debt and reparations. Growing critical scholarship suggests that a major outcome of—and underlying factor in—this political impasse has been an increase in the power of private financial institutions to set the terms of new climate-related investment, and to define narratives of (and capacity for) financing responses in their favor. [...]@en

Florida’s property insurance market is in crisis. Many of the Sunshine State’s insurers are raising rates or pulling out of communities, zip code by zip code. The average Florida homeowners insurance premium rose to nearly $11,000 in 2023, with notably higher rates in coastal South Florida cities—the costliest in the nation. This brewing insurance affordability crisis is particularly acute for Florida’s half-million housing cost-burdened households with mortgages, who must continue to purchase insurance or face default on their mortgage. That’s because mortgage lenders require borrowers to maintain insurance—a measure designed to protect the banking system, but which also places many frontline households in a serious affordability bind.@en

Home insurance markets in the United States are experiencing a mounting crisis. Worsening climate disasters like more intense hurricanes, wildfires, and hailstorms are making multi-billion-dollar payouts an annual occurrence, hitting a broad range of US states. Insurance protections are shrinking and becoming increasingly unaffordable, while private insurers are raising rates or pulling out of some markets entirely. Homeowners left behind face dilemmas like potential mortgage defaults—personal risks which may spiral into broader property market collapses. Meanwhile, renters and other households confront future uncertainties with even more limited protections. How can we more fully understand this mounting housing crisis, and what is to be done about it?@en

The expansion of Residential Real Estate Investment Trusts (R-REITs) represents an important frontier in the financialization of housing and cities. This paper advances the literature on institutional real estate investment and corporate landlordism by analyzing how and where the 15 largest, publicly-listed R-REITS and REIT-like funds in Germany and the US are growing today. First, we introduce the metaphor of the feeding machine to characterize how key actors like the state, private equity, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) provide R-REITs with the properties, capital, and imperative to grow. Second, we find four geographical expansion strategies at work: (1) investment beyond mainstream asset classes: from multi-family apartments and single-family rentals to student flats, care homes, and mobile home and recreational vehicle sites, (2) the concentration and consolidation of ownership, through mergers and acquisitions and focused investment in select markets, (3) acquisition across national borders, and (4) institution-led new construction. Despite crucial nuances in individual R-REIT strategies and the housing systems of each country, our comparative analysis reveals shared trajectories and rationalities of expansion. We posit that ETFs and the indexes through which they allocate investment increasingly shape the restless urban landscape of R-REIT growth, pumping liquidity into spatially fixed assets.@en

In US cities, drives to secure property value against climate risks have become a preoccupation for mainstream climate finance. This real property bias sidelines non-owners and inhabitants of historically marginalized housing types, limiting their capacity to prepare for and recover from climate change events. In this intervention, we survey major pathways of existing climate finance, before turning to emerging trends for residential ‘climate-proofing,’ retrofitting efforts that bring climate finance ‘home’ to the building level. Building on the concept of ‘real property supremacy,’ we demonstrate how resourcing climate response is limited by the privileging of real property in the structure and distribution of low-carbon financial tools and incentives. We argue that this privileging reproduces hierarchies of protection for some, while exacerbating existing social inequalities, exclusions, and predations for others—ultimately, yielding greater control over climate futures to those with asymmetrical power over real property. This structurally unequal treatment risks locking-in extant social hierarchies embedded in US real property relationships instead of seizing opportunities to transform them via the historic urban investments required for climate change.@en

Every year, more people across the United States experience climate disasters, forcing them to leave their homes, lose their belongings, and be separated from jobs and family. Meanwhile, home insurance markets are in a mounting crisis– and leaving people across the country behind. Media and policy makers are attuned to this crisis, but most are not offering analysis and solutions that address the core issue: how we ensure safe, accessible, and affordable housing in a time of increasing climate change-driven disasters.

Our new research outlines overlaps in insurance prices, housing costs, climate risk, and socioeconomic factors at national and state levels; provides critical analysis of prevailing industry narratives; offers a comprehensive policy proposal that aims to provide protections for homeowners and renters, meet the moment of a rapidly changing climate, and contribute to climate solutions rather than to the climate crisis.

Our analysis dives into case studies in California, Florida, and Minnesota, yet finds that no state is truly risk free in a climate-changed future.@en

Klimaatverandering zorgt tal van nieuwe risico’s voor gebouwen en infrastructuur. Het in kaart brengen van deze klimaatrisico’s is in volle gang, maar de betrouwbaarheid van de beoordelingen die hieruit volgen laat te wensen over en dit maakt de handelingsbasis beperkt. Dat concludeerden de experts die deelnamen aan de eerste Focal Point Meeting van het Red&Blue-programma over klimaatadaptatie. @en

Credit rating agencies like Moody's have amassed vast datasets about scale and distribution of climate risk. The proprietary "expertise" derived from this data increasingly guides how both governments and financial institutions respond to the crisis.@en

This conceptual and exploratory research study investigates, systematically and holistically, climate-adaptive spatial design interventions for high-density informal urban areas in hot arid climates, which remain understudied despite their vulnerability to heat stress and the heat-vulnerable groups populating them. Five streetscape design prototypes are proposed that include climate-adaptive spatial interventions appraised qualitatively with consideration to relevant feasibility matters: land use planning, equity, affordability, mobility, and sense of place. The study shows that there is potential for climate-adaptive interventions in informal urban areas in hot arid climates, but that these interventions also present challenges. Common climate-adaptive design strategies can be used to address heat stress in these areas but, for example, increasing vegetation might be challenging due to water stress. As a conceptual study, the findings presented and the discussion raised on feasibility are targeted at opening avenues for future research, and at informing decision-makers and spatial designers.

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How will climate change and its governance redraw maps of financial flows across the world, and with what implications for whom? Can the resources needed for decarbonization and adaptation to already‐arriving climate impacts be mustered at the scale and rate needed to mitigate socioecological harms and planetary destabilizations? Can they be deployed in a way that does not exacerbate pre‐existing risks and injustices, themselves often bound up in legacies of financialized extraction? Such questions, empirical and normatively inflected, are drawing growing attention from geographers. Increasingly, this questioning is coalescing around an influential, though still definitionally unsettled term and concept: climate finance.@en

 Real estate investment trusts (REITs) have been around since 1960 but have only become major players in housing markets in the last twenty years. The current and ongoing wave of residential REIT (R-REIT) expansion has attracted significant scholarly and broader public interest. This article examines how real estate, finance, and the state are configured in relation to each other through R-REITs. While much of the housing financialization literature has focused on the real estate/state axis of this relationship, we explore the underexamined connections between the real estate/finance axis and the finance/state axis of the real estate–finance–state triangle. We analyze the financial accounts of the world’s fifteen largest publicly traded R-REITs and R-REIT–like funds in the two largest markets: the United States and Germany. Our findings demonstrate how the ownership of R-REIT stock is remarkably homogeneous: the largest shareholders in each of the studied R-REITs are the three largest index exchange-traded funds, which are heavily backed by pension fund capital. For these investors, it is important that R-REITs provide a healthy return on investment at the lowest possible risk. The investors require the state, in its various guises, to guarantee attractive risk-adjusted returns on R-REITs investments. We identify six dimensions of state de-risking in this context, deepening our understanding of the role of the state in housing financialization. It is the state that creates the trust in real estate investment trusts, and it thus is what generates the investment in real estate investment trusts.@en

As intensifying climate-related disasters strike cities across the United States, they are provoking rising concern for the stability of the U.S. housing market and broader financial system. How homeowners, mortgage lenders, federal institutions/regulators, and investors will variously encounter and manage climate risk is an urgent question for urban scholars, as is who might bear the costs of restabilizing mortgage finance under new breakdowns. This paper’s multi-scalar intervention draws on financial “following” methods to explore how climate risks are being experienced and governed at multiple illustrative moments of U.S. mortgage finance: (1) working households at the front line of urban climate impacts, (2) mortgage professionals brokering loans to them, (3) government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) negotiating incoming federal climate risk disclosure requirements, and (4) capital markets off-taking GSE risks through financial derivatives like credit risk transfers. Emerging concerns include ruptures between household risks and financial system-preserving responses and new dangers of “climate redlining.”.

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Amidst growing concerns about climate risks to the U.S. housing markets, strategies to physically retrofit homes are gaining attention—including within debates over how to resolve intersecting crises of housing re/insurability and affordability in highly exposed sites like Florida. We consider an important but under-studied example of this “climate-proofing” strategy unfolding today: Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) finance. While PACE has historically financed decarbonization retrofits, it is increasingly being deployed to facilitate hurricane risk reduction in Florida. In this paper, we introduce PACE: its basic characteristics, evolving uses, and controversies. Exploring the Florida case, we examine two deeper but as yet under-examined financial tensions: PACE’s intersections with other forms of property-linked finance (and potential systemic breakdowns) and rising affordability breakpoints as homeowners encounter its new debt amidst other growing and intersecting climate/climate response costs. These issues call for more transformative imaginaries of urban retrofitting and its resourcing.@en

Reflecting on the limits of the sovereign-state centricity of mainstream contemporary climate action, Peter Taylor calls for new forms of regional geographical analysis and intervention. What might these aims and ambitions look and feel like for geographers? With this commentary, I take up Taylor's propositions through personal reflection on the work of “doing regional geography” in this current juncture of transnational climate action and transformation. I engage with the analytical challenges associated with regional climate research today – in my case, by way of financialized climate governance puzzles in Florida and the Netherlands. I also discuss how deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to knowledge production enliven my regional geographical engagement, but also generate new personal and disciplinary dilemmas. With this brief note, I hope to reinforce continued reflection on how geographers might take up – or inhabit – timely calls for regional analysis and intervention in climate-changing regions.@en

Meebewegen met het water, in de meest extreme vorm door adaptieve migratie, werpt vanuit economisch-geografisch perspectief een aantal belangrijke vragen op met betrekking tot agglomeratievoordelen, plaatsgebonden beleid en mobiliteit. Eerder onderzoek naar grootschalige verplaatsingen van productie en mensen (migratie) tonen aan dat welvaarts- en welzijnsverliezen aanzienlijk zijn, dat mitigatiestrategieën interregionale afstemming behoeven die moeilijk is vorm te geven, en dat steden en regio’s als groeimotoren van de economie niet 1-2-3 met plaatsgebonden beleid zijn te behouden of verplaatsen. Het nadenken over deze processen en factoren dient nu te beginnen, zodat we later niet achter de feiten aanlopen. Het doel van deze notitie is om de regionaal-economische ordeningsprincipes te duiden die samenhangen met de adaptatiestrategie ‘Meebewegen’, en in het bijzonder het meest extreme scenario van adaptieve migratie. Meebewegen is een scenario waarbij Nederland wordt geconfronteerd met 2 tot 5 meter zeespiegelstijging in de periode 2100 tot 2200 en inwoners en bedrijven zich aanpassen aan het water. Overstromingen kennen dan een grotere waarschijnlijkheid, hebben een groter impact, keren sneller terug of zijn onomkeerbaar. In (kwetsbare) delen van Nederland is daarbij sprake van terugtrekking in de vorm van adaptieve migratie. Meebewegen met water heeft economische consequenties, maar deze consequenties zijn in belangrijke mate afhankelijk van het moment waarop aanpassingen urgent worden. [...]@en

De watersnood in Limburg en Brabant. Het IPCC-rapport. De klimaattop in Glasgow. Afgelopen jaar is andermaal bevestigd dat klimaatverandering een urgent mondiaal probleem is dat Nederland bij uitstek raakt. Onderzoekers Tom Daamen en Zac Taylor doordenken wat dit voor gebiedsontwikkeling betekent - en welke kansen dit biedt. @en

Despite the growing power of finance over cities and housing, the relationships between finance, climate risk management, and urban governance have yet to be examined from a climate gentrification perspective. Putting the practices of a wide array of property finance stakeholders in conversation with the foundational concept of the rent gap, we identify two real estate rent dynamics that are emerging against the prospect of climate-driven urban restructuring: risk rents, or new forms of value capture crafted against future risk, and rent at risk, or the anticipated loss of rent due to risk. We in turn illustrate how climate risk–rent dynamics constitute new or intensified processes of gentrification in Greater Miami, Florida. Through three vignettes, we show how configurations of real estate and finance climate risk management produce variegated yet interrelated opportunities for devaluation and revaluation, displacement, and downgrading. Such strategies push the gentrification frontier into new physical as well as institutional spaces. The Greater Miami story underscores the need for new forms of knowledge, coalition building, and integrated urban climate risk management practices that directly confront underlying financial drivers of housing and spatial injustice in risky real estate markets.@en