who would profit?

two weeks ago I presented the studio toró work at the Michigan Council for Social Sciences, and after going through all the problems created by urban flooding in south America and our non-profit work towards dissemination information to mitigate the problem, one teacher in the audience asked me a very important question :

which industry do you think would profit from a more sustainable built environment, in this case in particular, from a higher permeability that would create less flooding?

I immediately thought about the insurance industry which has been sponsoring many studies of the impact of global warming on climate change, but almost nobody in Brazil has home insurance.
in other words, how can we break the cycle of more problems means more construction which brings more problems and therefore more construction becomes necessary?

in about two weeks the mayor of Belo Horizonte will be visiting us in Ann Arbor and I hope to ask him directly about that.