Economic Architecture The Podcast

In this week’s episode of The Economic Architecture podcast, Stuart Yasgur and Melissa Hoffer explore Massachusetts’s future with climate as a big-ticket item on the agenda. As Massachusetts’s first-ever climate chief, Hoffer’s remarkable work focuses on implementing long-term solutions and highlights the value of budgeting for the growing innovations in resilience.

In an exploration of the emerging science and law of nature-based solutions — from restoring wetlands in Leominster to protecting salt marshes and regrowth forests that provide measurable cooling, water filtration and flood storage — Stuart and Melissa discuss why permitting and insuring natural systems is still “a brave new world,” what it will take to get their value onto states’ balance sheets, and the critical moment when Melissa and her team realized the biggest lever isn’t solely greener material — it’s asking whether a new building needs to be built at all.