Insights

A city only has so much funding available to support flood mitigation projects, so they often have to prioritize which communities to aid. What sorts of neighborhoods are prioritized and why? Crestwood-Glen Cove, a suburb next to Memorial Park in Houston Imagine Harris County has a $50 million budget to build flood mitigation infrastructure this year, but two different neighborhoods need it immediately. Neighborhood A (River Oaks) has 10 large homes that are at risk of floodi

When it rains heavily in a forest, the ground is able to soak up the water like a sponge. Though, in Houston, the asphalt and concrete grounds that cover the city stop rain water absorption and instead cause flooding. How can we fix this runoff problem without inhibiting city growth? Stormwater collecting in a drain after a period of rainfall There are two main types of infrastructure that come into play with stormwater: gray infrastructure and green infrastructure. Houston h

Right now, Houston spends a lot of money after a storm hits to repair damage. What can the city do to save that money and prevent such damage from happening in the first place? Flooding in the urban area of Houston after Hurricane Harvey There are two major types of spending used to address the destruction inextricably linked with the type of heavy storms that Houston is prone to: proactive and reactive. If you buy a phone case for $40 to prevent your screen shattering from a

Oftentimes when at the store, you notice that the products labelled as organic or fair trade cost much more than the regular ones. Why is that? Sapling rising from glass cup of pennies One of the primary reasons that environmentally-friendly goods are more costly is their inclusion of negative externalities into the total price. A negative externality is an unintended consequence of an economic activity on the environment that proves to be bad. For example, if a farm makes go

As new environmental policies develop, they bring up a crucial question: does switching to these policies help or hurt economic growth, jobs, and businesses? Photograph depicting saplings growing To answer this question, let's first discover how adopting environmentally conscious practices helps the economy. One benefit of this action would be job creation, such as solar panel installation, wind turbine manufacturing, and electric vehicle production among many others. More im

As an effort to reduce factory-based pollution, carbon taxes are being implemented by the government, but what do they do and how effective are they really? Graphic illustrating the costly nature of nonrenewable energy resources To understand the real cost of large industries' activities, one needs to understand externalities and their wide-scale impact. In economics, an externality is an unintended side-effect of an activity that affects third parties not directly involved.