Ten Across Conversations

A note to listeners who may be sensitive to the subject matter: This episode contains brief descriptions of death and distress caused by climate events.   With a widescale and urgent phenomenon like climate change, there are innumerable ways to imagine communicating its impacts through articles, film, or television. That said, given the immensity of this subject within our minds and environment, c...

A note to listeners who may be sensitive to the subject matter: This episode contains a brief discussion of suicide risk among construction workers.   The work of decarbonizing our communities and cities has never been more critical than it is today. Countless observers of climate change are warning the world that our window to drastically reduce or eliminate fossil fuel use and avoid 1.5°C or mor...

Gensler began as a corporate interior design firm in the 1960s. Today, it is the world’s largest architecture firm in terms of revenue and staff. In 2023, Gensler employed 6,000 professionals across 53 offices globally, reaching 3,500 clients in more than 100 countries.   The influence of this firm within the building and design industry cannot be overstated. Given its reach, it is encouraging tha...

Artificial intelligence is advancing and intersecting with nearly all professional sectors today, including local government. However, without much AI-specific policy yet established at the federal or state levels, many cities are learning to navigate this emerging technology on their own.   A combination of public policy and residents’ openness to new ideas in the Phoenix metropolitan area has ma...

Arizona's unique natural beauty and lingering "Wild West" spirit often charm outside observers. That allure may waver when closer examination reveals realities of extreme temperatures, extended drought, and what author Tom Zoellner refers to as a "transient" community fabric.   In his 2023 book, Rim to River: Looking into the Heart of Arizona, Tom's collection of essays details his one-man pilgrim...

In part one of our interview with Brookings Metro fellow Tracy Hadden Loh , we discussed lasting influences of post-pandemic work trends on urban design and governance. Although it is the most recent example, the COVID-19 pandemic is not the first major disruptor of economic activity within major U.S. metros, and it certainly will not be the last. A century earlier, the widespread adoption of auto...

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent rise in remote work sent a ripple through most U.S. cities. Heavy office districts became ghost towns, public transit services struggled, and downtown brick and mortar retail spaces emptied in response to a sudden drop in foot traffic. During this period, there was also a significant migration of remote workers from more crowded and expensive cities like New Yo...

The responsibility of U.S. mayors expanded dramatically at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as cities of all sizes were forced to reckon with aging infrastructure, dated public health procedures, and a dramatic drop in revenue and activity within their urban cores. This historic disruption in communities compounded upon many other issues which local leaders in the 10X region and beyond have bee...

Phoenix, Arizona has seen meteoric population growth since 2010. Now the nation’s fifth largest city, its population increased by around 12% over the course of a decade. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this highly-engineered metropolis has continued to expand at the second fastest rate in the nation between 2021 and 2022. Counterintuitively, the region has experienced an escalation of extreme...

The fifth National Climate Assessment, or ‘the NCA,’ was released by the U.S. Global Change Research Program in November 2023. This robust and thoroughly peer-reviewed collection of scientific findings among 500 experts describes current climate impacts and recommended adaptation strategies across every sector and region of the country. The Ten Across Summit in Los Angeles took place less than a m...

At our recent Ten Across Summit in Los Angeles, we opened the event with a conversation between Ten Across Founder and Executive Director Duke Reiter and the award-winning political analyst and culture writer, Ron Brownstein. In the discussion, Brownstein shared his observations on the mood of the nation going into the 2024 election and the challenges he sees ahead; challenges often felt most prof...

In the last few decades California has been preoccupied with preparing for immediate disasters such as extended drought, wildfire, and earthquakes, thinking relatively little about the slow-moving threat upon its shores. Lulled by a century of no more than nine inches of sea level rise, California’s coastal communities now seem to be caught unprepared for the adaptations required by the three and...

In this special podcast distribution of our recent Ten Across Summit journalism panel, you’ll hear from six talented and prominent media professionals on how their work is changing alongside the climate. As the impacts of human-caused warming intensify and bleed into nearly every aspect of our lives, it has become an unavoidable story. With that in mind, this discussion explores best practices for...

We’re back from preparing for and hosting our recent Ten Across Los Angeles Summit with highlights and reflections from the event and from our most popular 2023 Ten Across Conversations podcast episodes. Join Ten Across Founder and Executive Director Duke Reiter as he shares insights from the summit and reviews salient points made in some of the most popular podcast episodes, along with hints at w...

An influential and predictive set of events are currently playing out in Florida around climate, real estate, and insurance, which the rest of the nation would be well-served in keeping within their sights. As the third largest and notoriously weather-beaten state, Florida has added 3.1 million new residents within the last decade—an amount greater than the entire population of Arkansas. This popu...

A drought on the Mississippi River has pushed a massive saltwater wedge from the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans, contaminating clean water supplies for several Louisiana river communities. Aside from the obvious public health concerns, this salty water is highly destructive to pipes and appliances within residents’ homes. Unfortunately, this risk comes at a time when local insurance industry se...

With climate change, it is becoming harder to find comprehensive and affordable home insurance policies across the nation— and especially in California, where the state’s four largest private insurers have significantly reduced their coverage within the last year due to increasing construction and reinsurance costs, and wildfire risk. Earlier this year, State Farm and Allstate stopped underwriting...

The first eight months of 2023 brought $23 billion in damages from weather-related events, a new record at this point in the year. Those events included unique flooding from atmospheric rivers in California; an extended heat dome over Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, and other parts of the US; the Category 3 Hurricane Idalia in Florida; and of course, the horrific wildfires in Maui. The human and physic...

As our summers become hotter and longer, droughts become more likely, foliage dies at a faster rate, and the likelihood of personal exposure to a wildfire inevitably increases. According to The Washington Post , one in six Americans now live in a wildfire prone area. And as the transpiring events of this particularly devastating fire season for Canada have demonstrated— even if a community is not...

As private sector leaders look to locate or expand their businesses—especially within the Ten Across region—they are asking questions that now far exceed the traditional real estate matters of land, space, and cost. In addition to this checklist, they are asking about water availability, energy sources, transportation, resilient public infrastructure and how climate change will impact or influence...

In a warming world, we are becoming increasingly reliant on air conditioning to keep our biological, economic, and health systems functioning. But this cooling technology has not come without its costs. According to the Clean Cooling Collaborative , this action of cooling our homes, businesses, medicine, goods, and more contributes to more than 7% of overall greenhouse gas emissions. Factoring in...

The 20th Century city was made possible by inventions such as the automobile and air conditioning. But as temperatures rise and cities continue to grow in both size and population, we are quickly approaching the sustainable threshold of use of these polluting technologies. The historic ways we have gone about AC unit construction; city and building design, and the traditional combustion vehicle, h...

When the ESG framework— standing for Environment, Social and Governance— was first introduced among investors and business leaders, it was intended to inspire or demonstrate a greater concern for the environment and society upon which major corporations depend. It has most often been a vehicle for influencing organizational decisions around resource consumption, staff diversity, and overall carbon...

We are entering a new climate— One that looks very different from the one we’ve known, Jeff Goodell concludes in his latest book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.” This summer has produced record-breaking temperatures in nearly every corner of the world, including even the deepest parts of our oceans. Sea ice around Antarctica is at a record-low for the satellite...

Warning: This episode contains some curse words and a mention of sexual assault. For those that live in border cities — most often those with binational families, businesses, and personal cultures; images of the U.S.-Mexico border that are conjured up in nightly news segments or political debates can be drastically different from their lived reality. This is similarly true for those who study or w...