Mark Tercek: Green Infrastructure Outperforms Gray
Follow Mark Tercek on Twitter: @MarkTercek (http://goo.gl/P4hLhM) An oyster reef costs about the same amount of money - $1 million per mile - as a seawall. But when you consider other factors...
==========
So people ask me about green infrastructure. And by green infrastructure, and we sometimes call it natural capital, that's kind of our wonky term for using nature as an asset base. And you can contrast that with gray infrastructure, man-made infrastructure. There are so many instances now when we can compare and contrast an investment in nature, green infrastructure, versus an investment in grey infrastructure. One example would be oyster reefs. We learned we got stimulus money from President Obama when we had the economic crisis and it was really interesting work that we did. We showed that for $1 million we could build one mile of oyster reef in the gulf. It happens to be that it cost about $1 million as well to build a mile of first-rate first class ...
==========
So people ask me about green infrastructure. And by green infrastructure, and we sometimes call it natural capital, that's kind of our wonky term for using nature as an asset base. And you can contrast that with gray infrastructure, man-made infrastructure. There are so many instances now when we can compare and contrast an investment in nature, green infrastructure, versus an investment in grey infrastructure. One example would be oyster reefs. We learned we got stimulus money from President Obama when we had the economic crisis and it was really interesting work that we did. We showed that for $1 million we could build one mile of oyster reef in the gulf. It happens to be that it cost about $1 million as well to build a mile of first-rate first class ...
