Savannah Cox

At cafe, playing terrifying game of “am I having a stroke or are they just speaking a Scandinavian language”. Thankfully it happens to be the latter in this round.

Human Geography at Leicester is facing closure. Staff contracts are to end in June 2026; students are to be relocated to other universities, or taught out by a maximum of two (!) teaching-only staff. Other departments and subjects are facing closure, too. Please join the demo!

The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands The short documentary “Rovina’s Choice” tells the story of what goes when aid goes.

“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death”…As of November 5th, [conservative models] estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.”

www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Melissa was one of the strongest storms on record. NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters flew into it without pay | CNN The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Hurricane Hunters have spent the past week diving into the eye of Melissa — a storm of historic ferocity — to gather life-saving data. But the gov...

Melissa was one of the strongest storms on record. NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters flew into it without pay.

Crews are asked “To be fully mentally present, especially in this environment, and it’s hard to do that when you know you can’t potentially make ends meet.” www.cnn.com/2025/10/31/w...

Get yourself a friend who can use a brush, some paint, and paper to bring you much closer to your elderly pug across the pond. Thank you @johnhoganmorris.bsky.social for my lovely portrait of Margo aka Presh 😍

Absolutely loved learning about @natashaheenan.bsky.social’s work on geoengineering and its status in the broader politics of climate repair. Super provocative and original thinking—highly recommend folks read it!

Call for abstracts: "Insurance, Climate Change, and Spatial Governance" paper session for the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California, March 17-21, 2026

I'm co-organizing this session with some amazing scholars. Here's our extended abstract:

Climate and insurance folks: please join @jathansadowski.com, Leigh Johnson, Stephen Collier and me for an AAG session on insurance, spatial governance and climate adaptation. CFP below, abstract form here:

forms.gle/wQNrgtRmJETV...

About as desirable as a root canal without anesthesia

Yes. And Booker’s moment I think is probably over (another aspect of my McGrath resentment). We have a bit of a young Dem leadership gap in the state — hopefully the party nationally lets us figure it out this time rather than impose itself…but that would require learning 😂

Maybe things will be different now but I don’t see her resonating at all — as a KYian I find her very frustrating and irrelevant and wish she would go away but Dem $ means she won’t. Beshear is a better option but I don’t know if he wants that role.

This is today folks! Finance/risk/urban climate obsessives, please join!

I'm so excited to share the launch of a new collaboration between @cmmonwealth.bsky.social and @cplusc.bsky.social: The Transition Security Project. TSP will be a home for research, analysis, and new policy thinking at the intersection of climate, economy, & the military industries of the US and UK🧵

To get a flavor for what we'll talk about, check out the special issue here: utppublishing.com/toc/jccpe/4/1

Oh my god, me too. Our initial planning convo was already amazing. Can’t wait for your feisty insurance as urban planner quips!

Upcoming launch event for a C40 Cities special issue that @zacjtaylor.bsky.social & I have edited on climate risk, finance, and adaptation! We’ll speak with some stellar panelists: @pmbigger.bsky.social, @lindashi.bsky.social, @kellyhereid.bsky.social & Kayin Venner.

Register here: bit.ly/4m7kCDo

I get that the UK is basically managing decline now, which among other things means that many of its “world leading” universities offer a pittance for research funds, forcing sharp rises in small grant apps. But can we please at least still “fail” through the eyes of a human rather than a machine?

I tried to listen to the audiobook and had to turn it off a couple minutes in — and I say this as someone who admittedly listened to all of “original sin” narrated by Jake Tapper 🫠 curious what you made of it

My theory is that if we taxed most of these people without telling them and the people they pay to manage their money didn't tell them, they'd never notice.

And if you'd never notice you should be taxed even more.

“National grid-private solar generation fights but make it Taylor Swift” (I won’t keep this as the subhead…maybe)

Excited to have an article on housing, finance, and climate change in this special issue. It was a fun and wide-ranging conversation with @ianguelovski.bsky.social @lindashi.bsky.social, @savannahcox.bsky.social, and others.

Savannah Cox: Right. This links back to what we discussed at the outset of our conversation. In lieu of more holistic plans, financial players and ideas tend to become the “default” frames through which we think about climate risk and how to act on it in cities. Kelly Hereid: One thing we talk about in the insurance space is that insurance is behaving as the adaptation policymaker of last resort. Because by the time there is a payout from a disaster on an insurance policy, there were six different places where an intervention could have happened that didn’t—zoning, where you’re allowed to build, building codes, infrastructure investments, city planning, and so on. And when all of those fail or don’t happen and a disaster happens, insurance is there to mitigate that end risk. Because there has been historically very little appetite to make any of those upstream investments.

The whole conversation was really fun and wide ranging, but among many great points, I think this one by Kelly is worth highlighting: by the time you're turning to insurance to act as an adaptation mechanism, you've messed up so many other opportunities along the way

Totally! I may be in touch regarding some public-facing events on the SI in September…stay tuned!

One of my favorite discussions in the issue.

How often do you get a climate scientist, legal scholar of corporations and climate risk, and an urban geographer together to talk about the stakes of private finance shaping public knowledge on urban climate risk? More of these conversations, please.

Structural Barriers to Financing Just Adaptation in Majority World Cities | Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy This interview offers multiple vantage points on the challenges and barriers to climate adaptation faced by cities in the Global South. Experts from the Caribbean and the Pacific emphasize the need for a nuanced understanding of urban climate adaptation finance, drawing on examples from the Philippines and St. Kitts and Nevis to illustrate how physical and financial risks are deeply cojoined in climate-vulnerable cities. The discussion highlights the increasing reliance on blended finance and de-risking strategies to attract private capital, while questioning the effectiveness of these approaches in addressing the unique needs of diverse urban contexts. The discussion underscores the importance of recognizing historical and structural factors, such as colonial legacies, extant modalities of climate finance disbursement, and fiscal federalism, that shape the climate adaptation needs. The interview identifies key reform priorities to the international financial architecture, particularly concerning institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, to alleviate the burdens of debt-bearing climate finance that disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. The conversation indicates that without addressing systemic macroeconomic issues, cities will continue to face escalating risks from climate change, ultimately jeopardizing their resilience and sustainability.

Majority World cities are already bearing the brunt of climate change but remain woefully underfunded to adapt to a warmer reality. In this new paper, I interview Manny de Vera and Fayola Jacobs about barriers to just urban climate adaptation in the Philippines and the Caribbean. 🧵 of key takeaways:

Back in the US. Suburbs. Made the fatal error of thinking it would be a good idea to work from a cafe. As a punishment, I am seated next to a woman in Private Equity who has made the word “deals” polysyllabic. Please send prayers.

Having read “economic sociology” throughout my PhD, constantly wowed, it was such a treat to be invited to write an essay for it. Drawing on my work on cities, bond markets, and infrastructure, I discuss how the subfield can take up climate adaptation and inequality.

[My mom, Pam, tapping out of the Hannah Arendt documentary at 9:30 pm]: Let’s finish this tomorrow. I want to give this the attention it deserves.

Me: are you going to bed?

Pam: no, I’m going to watch something else.

Me: you’re the worst.

Pam [deadpans]: no, Heidegger is the worst.

/scene

this is the level of funding where all the possibilities for American politics that have been described as hyperbolic over the past decades - the comparisons to Nazi Germany and other nightmares of the 20th century - become logistically possible and politically likely

‘We are perilously close to the point of no return’: climate scientist on Amazon rainforest’s future Carlos Nobre, who has fought for decades to save the rainforest, says up to 70% of it could be lost if a tipping point is reached

Your 'moment of doom' for June 27, 2025 ~ If?

"If the Amazon hits a tipping point, our calculations show we are going to lose 50-70% of the forest. That would release between 200 and 250bn tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2050 and 2100..."