New York City Planners Focus on Climate Adaptation

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Rising sea levels, more intense storms, and devastating heat waves threaten to wreak havoc on New York City in the coming decades, and the threat has city planners and engineers, plus regional scientists, utility companies, and government agencies working hard to study the issue and craft a response. Other cities along the eastern seaboard should be paying attention.

A great overview of this topic for any local government decision maker is the excellent article "New York Girds Itself for Heat and Rising Seas" by Bruce Stutz at Yale Environment 360. Stutz spells out the risks and uncertainties  faced by NYC, and how planners are developing a "risk-based, cost-benefit" adaptation strategy:

An Adaptation Task Force, made up of some 20 city departments, New York State and interstate authorities, and power and communications industries, has begun developing an inventory of infrastructures at risk. Working with local communities they hope to develop strategies — from keeping development away from the waterfront, to maintaining sewer systems, to evacuation plans, to protecting waterfront neighborhoods.

Another key quote in the story for local government staff to absorb, from Gary Heath, Director of the Bureau of Operations for the DEP’s Bureau of Environmental Planning and Analysis:

[Adaptation] has to become part of an agency’s working philosophy. Once you recognize climate change as a risk to your infrastructure, then you take it into account in all of your designs and operations. You do it facility by facility.

Climate Progress covered the topic a day later, with an emphasis on NYC planners' need for accurate local predictions on future climate change impacts. By 2050, will sea level rise one and a half feet or three feet? A difference in inches translates to potentially billions more dollars in preparation for a city like New York. From Climate Progress:

Scientists are laboring to make their predictions more reliable. While they do, New York has become an urban experiment in the ways that seaboard cities can adapt to climate change over the next century. For their part, the city’s long-term planners are taking action but are trying to balance the cost of re-engineering the largest city in the U.S. against the uncertainties of climate forecasts.

“We can’t make multibillion-dollar decisions based on the hypothetical,” says Rohit Aggarwala, the city’s director of long-term planning and sustainability.

An additional resource for urban planners beginning to tackle adaptation issues: In February 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change produced a Climate Risk Information report, with climate change scenarios for NYC, infrastructure impacts, and an explanation of its indicators and monitoring.