Creating Climate-Resilient Cities: Progress in NYC and Beyond

Web sites

America’s Climate Choices
At the National Academy of Sciences, a 2009 Summit will produce four reports, one of them on adapting to impacts. (NPCC member Gary Yohe served on this panel.)

Center for Clean Air Policy
New York City participates in the Urban Leaders Adaptation Initiative, a network of ten large counties and cities that serves as a resource to local governments. It is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group
A group of the world's largest cities, one of them New York, C40 is tackling climate change. It partners with the Clinton Climate Change Initiative to reduce carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency.

Cities Act: The Copenhagen Climate Summit for Mayors
Mayors convened in Copenhagen in December 2009 to share approaches to addressing climate change.

ICLEI
This international association of local governments pursues climate protection and sustainable development. See its Climate Resilient Communities Program.

New York City
PlaNYC 2030 is the City’s long-term sustainability plan. See pages on climate change and a wealth of related documents, including the NPCC’s February 2009 report, Climate Risk Information. In 2008, the Dept. of Environmental Protection published a Climate Change Program Assessment and Action Plan.

New York State
See the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Office of Climate Change and its Sea Level Rise Task Force, NYSERDA’s Climate Change Research Program and ClimAID project, and the Governor’s Executive Order establishing a carbon reduction goal and Climate Action Council that is to produce a Climate Action Plan.

National Weather Service
See its Climate Services Division and Eastern Region Climate Services Program.

Urban Climate Change Research Network
This consortium analyzes climate change mitigation and adaptation and energy issues from an urban perspective. Its First Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities, ARC3, is in the works.

U.S. Global Change Research Program
This federal interagency program integrates research on climate and global change. In 2009 it published a comprehensive, plain-English assessment of current and potential impacts of climate change on U.S. regions and on such sectors as energy, water, agriculture, and health.

Publications

Macabrey, J-M. 2009. The Dutch strive to make their country 'climate proof'. The New York Times (June 1).

Nordenson, G. et al. 2008. On the Water: The New York - New Jersey Upper Bay. Places/The Design Group (Oct. 15). Of particular interest: the lurid graphics.

Ousareff, N. 2009. Future Dangers for a Maritime City. The New York Times (Oct. 21). “A dense network of piers, wetlands and oyster beds could project out into New York Harbor . . . breaking up storm surges. An additional archipelago of small fingerlike islands could be built in the center of the harbor, and old subway cars could be dumped into the water to form reefs.”

Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront, an exhibit sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, March 24-August 9, 2010. Funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the exhibit presents proposals, developed in an architects-in-residence program, for adapting to sea-level rise.

Stutz, B. 2009. New York City Girds Itself for Heat and Rising Seas. Environment 360, Yale University (September 10).

Wolman, D. 2008. Before the Levees Break: A Plan to Save the Netherlands. Wired (December 22). A lavishly illustrated blockbuster.

World Bank. 2008. Climate Resilient Cities. “A practical guide to climate-proof our cities.”

From the Academy

Bracing for Super Floyd: how storm surge barriers could protect the New York region, featuring Malcolm Bowman and Doug Hill. 2005. New York Academy of Sciences eBriefing, sponsored by the Environmental Sciences Section.

New York City Panel on Climate Change. 2010. Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response. Annals: 1183 (Forthcoming in April).

Climate change: what we know and what we can do, featuring Michael Oppenheimer et al. 2008. New York Academy of Sciences eBriefing, sponsored by Green Science and Environmental Policy Group.

How will the engineering community, regulators, and the insurance industry work through the monumental task of assessing and adapting the built environment’s vulnerability to changing climate stresses?

How quickly will academic curricula (engineering, law, business, public policy, etc.) reflect these advances?

Will the insurance industry, which prices risk on the basis of historical data and writes policies year-to-year, integrate climate change projections into its pricing?

As the work of adaptation moves forward, sector by sector, impact by impact, will acceptable levels of risk be redefined upwards or downwards?

How will emergency response capabilities evolve?

The UK’s newsmaker 2007 Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change termed climate change “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.” Will the pressures of climate change drive changes in mainstream economic theory and practice, so that what are now treated as externalities are fully accounted for?

How severely will a weak economy erode adaptation and mitigation efforts? How many jobs will adaptation and mitigation efforts generate? Displace?

How compliant will NYC building owners be with the mandates of the new Greener, Greater Buildings Plan? How will the City enforce it?

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process has been the template for environmental decisionmaking at all levels of government for four decades. How well can its conceptual framework accommodate climate change impacts?

How can decision makers be helped to integrate climate change considerations into routine planning and budgeting? To apply optimal-scheduling theory? To sell it to the public?

Will the need for government agencies to share common climate projections and coordinate decision making about adaptation drive closer coordination on other issues?

Speakers: Cynthia Rosenzweig & William Solecki, co-chairs, and members of the New York City Panel on Climate Change, including Gary Yohe, Robin Leichenko, Radley Horton, Vivien Gornitz, Malcolm Bowman, Rae Zimmerman, Craig Faris, David Major, Alice LeBlanc, Megan Linkin, Klaus Jacob, Reginald Blake, and Megan O’Grady; stakeholders from the NYC Climate Change Adaptation Task Force; Adam Freed and Aaron Koch, Mayor's Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability, City of New York.

Presented by the NYC Panel on Climate Change, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, City University of New York, and the New York Academy of Sciences.

A science-driven mandate

What could climate change mean for New Yorkers? Among many potential impacts: sea-level rise, more-intense rain storms, more severe storm surges, and resultant flooding that could cause contaminant leaching from flooded wastewater treatment plants, more combined sewer overflows, and flooding of airports, shipping port facilities, aboveground rail lines, subways, tunnels, highways, and utility corridors. More potential impacts: longer, hotter, and more frequent heat waves that create thermal conditions that could put additional strain on engineered structures and that boost demand for air conditioning, producing more power outages.

The potential for those and many other impacts is the driver for the NYC Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) and the NYC Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. Comprising approximately 20 climate change and impact scientists, legal, insurance, and risk management experts, the Panel serves as the technical advisory body for the Task Force, which comprises 40 City, State, and federal agencies, regional public authorities, and private firms that operate, maintain, or regulate critical local infrastructure. The NPCC's mandate is to provide climate change projections and tools that the Task Force and the City can use to fashion adaptation strategies to protect the city's critical infrastructure. Impacts sketched above and projected climate changes summarized in the table below reflect just some of the NPCC's work. (A long list of potential infrastructure impacts can be found on page 27 of the NPCC's Climate Risk Information workbook.)

That table should command wide attention, and at the Academy its significance was illuminated in a climate change knowledge network event that examined how New York City is preparing to adapt to climate change. Titled "Climate Change and New York City: Creating Flexible Adaptation Pathways," the event was guided by NPCC Co-chairs Cynthia Rosenzweig and William Solecki, and Adam Freed, chair of the Adaptation Task Force.

In opening remarks, Cristina Rumbaitis del Rio of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funds the NPCC, highlighted the significance of the City's efforts. While the foundation's climate change work is primarily focused abroad, where vulnerabilities are greatest, it chose to invest in New York, she explained, for many reasons. Among them: the City's leadership "in confronting these challenges head on, by assembling [in the NPCC and Task Force] the best scientific resources, technical information, and a diverse set of stakeholders to create an evidence base" that can inform policy making. Del Rio stated that only a handful of cities have taken similar steps, "and none ...have leveraged science so effectively and transparently." New York is an important example to other cities across the globe, she said, and it shares its lessons learned widely. This makes it even more important, of course, that New York City "get it right."

Design Integrative Process

It certainly is trying hard. The NPCC and Task Force coordinate closely. The NPCC released its Climate Risk Information workbook in February 2009; the Task Force has been relying on it as it develops its adaptation plan. The NPCC report previewed at the Academy is designed to serve the Task Force. It places NYC adaptation efforts in context, develops the rationale for a risk-based approach, summarizes climate observations and projections, identifies potential climate impacts on infrastructure and sketches adaptation challenges, offers a preliminary examination of how law and regulation could be adapted to facilitate adaptation to climate change, presents the insurance industry's perspective, and urges a long-term program of monitoring.

The report includes an Adaptation Assessment Guidebook that stakeholders—not only in NYC but elsewhere—can use to develop and implement adaptation plans, and a Climate Protection Levels workbook that assesses NYC policies and regulations relevant to infrastructure in light of climate change. The report's Executive Summary will be must-reading for all New Yorkers who care about their city's future.

The Task Force will produce a plan of its own in 2010. It may well be enriched by what Task Force members heard at the Academy in December 2009.

Focus: protecting critical infrastructure

The subject of climate change is vast. The NPCC and Task Force focus is necessarily narrow. As Solecki stated flatly, "We're looking explicitly at adaptation, not mitigation. What can we propose as a framework for action in adapting?" But this quickly gets complicated. As NPCC member Gary Yohe said in describing the graph below, "There's a complementarity of adaptation and mitigation: the two work together to make themselves more productive." And as NPCC member Alice LeBlanc said, "Without mitigation, adaptation is a losing proposition." Indeed, the two can overlap.

Conceptual illustration of how types of response to climate risk affect levels of risk.

The City's initial adaptation focus is critical infrastructure, primarily communications systems, transportation (rail, shipping ports, airports, bridges, tunnels, roads), energy, and water and wastewater systems. Significantly, while "infrastructure" commonly connotes hard, physical structures like bridges and power plants, adapting infrastructure to climate change encompasses operations, management practices, policies, emergency management capabilities—whatever can be exploited to minimize or avoid adverse impacts.

As Freed stressed, the City thus aims at something deeper than adaptation: it aims at long-term climate resilience—the institutional and physical capacity to absorb the long-term trends and near-term vagaries of climate while maintaining risk at socially acceptable levels.

As Solecki explained, those levels are embedded in building codes, zoning regulations, and engineering and design performance standards, all tailored to historical climate conditions. All must now be reviewed; some must be revised. That is, "institutional infrastructure" must be adapted, too. Examining "the enormous corpus of law and regulation at all levels—federal, state, and local—relevant to New York City" to determine their applicability to adaptation efforts is "just the first step in this enormous process," one that "is urgently needed," reflected David Major, a member of the Science Planning Team that supports the NPCC.

What's the City's timeframe? NPCC climate projections focus on this century and extend to 2100. They encourage consideration of potential climate changes even beyond that date in planning for infrastructure with long lifespans, such as subway tunnels. But as Yohe said, "Climate change is already happening; impacts are being observed." Therefore the NPCC and the Task Force stress that adaptation measures and planning are needed now.

Hallmarks of the City's approach to adaptation

Because consequential decisions about infrastructure will be informed by NPCC projections and Task Force strategies, how those bodies are designed and how they approach their work is a subject of great interest.

The NPCC is modeled on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. An independent, science-based, multidisciplinary body, it comprises climate scientists, experts on climate change impacts, and legal, insurance, and risk management experts. Mindful of the recent controversy surrounding publication of climate scientists' private emails, Rosenzweig pointedly stressed that NPCC members

Given uncertainties, probabalistic risk management governs the NPCC's approach to climate projections, and it is formally recommending that the City pursue a risk-based approach to adaptation, coupled with continuous monitoring of climate effects, and learning. The NPCC and Task Force both aim to create a framework for a process that is itself flexible and adaptive. Climate projections will evolve as climate changes and as research yields new data; better and more fine-grained, downscaled climate models; and better understanding of historical variability.

Assessing adaptation efforts will yield lessons too. Yohe observed that "midcourse corrections are going to be as essential in the future as recognizing this was a risk-based problem was in the past." But, he remarked, "What is really difficult . . . is this iterative business. Exactly how do you keep going back to this problem? How do you monitor [and] incorporate new science?" For a city to learn how to be adaptive is a challenge.

For a city to learn how to be adaptive is a challenge.

The Task Force's diversity is a great strength: members represent multiple levels of government and, Freed stressed, the private sector. Indeed, he speculated, it may be the first such body to include the private sector. Those representatives are the majority.

To serve the Task Force, the NPCC has developed and advocates a "tool-based process." Beyond producing workbooks for Task Force use, it has identified existing tools that can facilitate adaptation—that body of existing laws, regulations, codes, and standards, along with capabilities like the Office of Emergency Management. Aaron Koch, who works with the Task Force, termed that office "one of the best in the country," and he pointed to other strengths: climate initiatives under way in the private sector and PlaNYC. The NPCC applauds the City, Rosenzweig said, for developing "an evolving dynamic process" and for integrating climate change adaptation with a broad range of sustainability activities, so it's not siloed.

The ultimate goal of the NPCC and Task Force is to put themselves out of business. As Freed stated, "Ideally, we don't need a special task force or plan because it is internalized ...everyone in every planning process takes into account climate change from the get go."

Working on a frontier

Relying on climate projections rife with uncertainties, the Task Force must identify infrastructure vulnerabilities, determine which risks are likeliest and which could have the biggest impacts, develop adaptation strategies, and prioritize them. And it must devise decision pathways for those strategies and place them on a time line running far into the future.

Future Climate Projections

As indicated by the graph above, some climate projections entail large uncertainties, and sorting matters out can be devilishly hard. A dramatic example is whether to construct storm surge barriers in New York Harbor to protect the city from flooding—a subject that arose a number of times during the day. NPCC member Klaus Jacob termed it the "big elephant in the room," and he presented both the case for barriers and sobering cautions against erecting "hard structures."

Major observed that the issue is one to which the theory of optimal scheduling applies: in some instances, deferring a near-term investment may be beneficial in the long term. In this instance, Major suggested, improving evacuation plans now and adopting other interim measures could buy time that would favor a more robust decision later. But, Yohe pointed out,

Another fiendish complication: nonlinear tipping points and triggers, characterized by Rosenzweig as "extremely important, very challenging, very hard to study." Rapid ice melt, which could raise sea level and thus aggravate storm surges, is one example.

Major stressed that optimally integrating adaptation measures into capital investment cycles and rehab plans could yield substantial savings, and that studies are needed to better understand this. Engineers should design to a range of climate projections, he suggested, so that optimal scheduling is linked to robust designs.

The fact that the insurance industry—characterized by LeBlanc as "the canary in the coal mine"—prices risk on the basis of historical data and writes policies year to year prompted discussion. Its catastrophe modeling tools can help the City gain insight into the potential for financial damage caused by climate change, LeBlanc said. NPCC member Megan Linkin, of Swiss Re, reported that New York City ranks high on indices of weather-related risks. A current worst-case scenario hurricane could inflict roughly $150 billion in insured losses on the metro area; double that for economic losses.

Beyond infrastructure impacts

Although the stated focus of the NPCC and Task Force is the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure, it seems certain the City will broaden its focus over time, and not surprisingly members of the audience raised concerns about other matters. Kim Knowlton of the Natural Resources Defense Council asked if the NPCC report updates projections of heat-related mortality and illness. NPCC member Vivien Gornitz explained that the report does not consider health issues but that a statewide project does. That project is NYSERDA's ClimAID. Health impacts are also within scope for a NYS Sea Level Rise Task Force.

Strong concerns were raised about protecting vulnerable populations from climate change impacts. Agreeing that those concerns are important, NPCC member Jacob reflected that "with all extreme events, the most vulnerable people are those who have the least resources ...Natural hazards and disasters are simply an amplifier of those social disparities." NPCC member Robin Leichenko said the ClimAID project, which she participates in, is "explicitly looking at vulnerability ...and equity and environmental justice issues."

Similarly, consideration of ecosystem services and the potential for "green infrastructure" to mitigate climate change were urged. Ecosystem services are within the scope of the City's Adaptation Task Force, but Kristin Marcell of the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation said the NYS Sea Level Rise Task Force is focusing heavily on how ecosystems and ecosystem services will be affected by climate change. Unfortunately, while that task force is "in theory ...comparable to what NYC has done ...in practice we don't have funding to undertake our work," she said. "So we are hoping to build on everything that has been done in New York City."

Coordination issues

ClimAID and the Sea Level Rise Task Force are just two of many initiatives under way in New York State, and as Freed remarked, more and more are "popping up every day." Coordination among multiple levels of government and other entities is crucial, to avoid overlap and ensure common climate projections and methodologies, and consistency through time. Some individuals do serve on two or more bodies. But as Freed stated, "coordination is difficult"; Rosenzweig termed it "a key challenge."

NPCC climate projections are regional, covering a 150-mile radius from the city. Rosenzweig underscored the importance and difficulty of coordinating and unifying climate scenarios in a field in which new findings are reported weekly. NOAA is "developing the potential for a climate services program for the nation," she reported. One goal would be overall national consistency, so scenarios and science projections for climate change could be coordinated. She reflected that, "in a way, the NPCC effort stems from lack of that program over past years."

Critical interdependencies among stakeholders

Interdependencies among stakeholders who are responsible for critical infrastructure were a recurrent theme. In his presentation, NPCC member Craig Faris had termed them "critical," saying the NPCC believes that understanding them "will provide much more robust solutions and a much broader and more implementable approach." In commenting on public health as an issue beyond the scope of the NPCC, Task Force member Tom Matte of the NYC Department of Health & Public Hygiene took that point deep:

Task Force member Mike Hainzl of Ericsson Services Inc. emphasized interdependencies too, noting that, for example, repairing a damaged communications network requires that energy and transportation sectors be functioning. He added this pragmatic point:

Similarly, Solecki noted the value of the "dynamic interplay" between the NPCC, an independent body of experts, and Task Force stakeholders. Increased communication among "representatives of city agencies who rarely speak with one another on a daily basis [has been] a tremendous product of the process," he said.

Sampling of other stakeholder views

Stakeholders on the Task Force, representing communications, transportation, energy, and water and wastewater sectors, were uniformly enthusiastic about the value of the City's efforts—not least, about the new NPCC maps displaying projected impacts. Task Force member Hainzl urged that they be offered in digital form, so they can be geo-queried. Esther Siskind of the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, which created a Climate Change Task Force in 2004, emphasized the need for better and updated flood maps and for updated definitions of, for example, a 10-year storm, as well as the need "to stay on top of the science ...and to downscale it to the region." That, she said, is "what we appreciate most about the NPCC."

Victoria Simon of the New York Power Authority reported that because NYPA's paramount concern is reliability, it focuses on reducing risks to assets and personnel. The Task Force's approach "will continue to help us, whether it's climate change, or emergency situations, or just basic risk reductions." Working on climate adaptation is prompting a more holistic approach to planning, she added. As part of its sustainability planning, NYPA is developing a climate adaptation strategy for all its facilities.

Susanne DesRoches of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey remarked that simply bringing climate change information in-house in accessible form was valuable. "I work in the Engineering Department and referencing the IPCC report is not something that anybody on the staff is doing on a regular basis." But everyone is really curious, she said. It wasn't that change was seen as an impediment; rather, the information about what to do was not readily available. The department now evaluates all projects based on NPCC climate risk information.

Recommendations, suggestions, and concerns

The NPCC's formal findings and recommendations are presented in its report. Among other critical issues and needs raised in the course of the day, by stakeholders, the audience, and NPCC members themselves were the following:

• Vulnerable populations
  • Monitoring changes in human vulnerability to climate change.
  • Much more effective outreach to vulnerable populations and the general public.
• Broader outreach concerns
  • Visual modes of communication that are more appealing than graphs and a barrage of arcane technical data.
  • Continuing to build broad public understanding of, and support for, adaptation efforts.
  • Greatly expanding programs that involve community groups and students in gathering data to monitor climate change—efforts that yield multiple benefits.
  • Devising visible markers of near-term progress to bring the reality of climate change and adaptation home.
• Vested interests
  • Figuring out how to overcome vested interests that resist change.
  • Employing incentives and regulations to motivate changes in behavior.
  • Developing regulations that do not impose unreasonable costs or other burdens.
• Learning
  • Coordinated, continued monitoring and reassessment of climate, impacts, and related data, so planning reflects the latest climate change science.
  • Case studies of actual responses to severe weather events.
  • Institutionalizing a quick-response system that documents responses before information decays.
  • Factoring qualitative as well as quantitative values into economic analyses and considering 2009 Nobel Prize Laureate Elinor Ostrom's work on managing common-pool natural resources.
• Adaptation Task Force
  • A Task Force focused on the built environment could include social scientists, architects, planners, engineers, and landscape architects.
  • The Task Force could be expanded and institutionalized, to create long-term participatory mechanisms for a broader array of stakeholders and communities.
• An interventionist, environmental engineering approach to adaptation may have to be reconciled with an approach favoring restoration of ecosystems.
• How climate change could impact the city's food supply should be examined.
• Regional collaborations in the federal regulatory arena would be advantageous.
• Leading by example is one of the best ways to get other people to act.

Speakers: Rohit Aggarwala (New York City Mayor's Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability), Henriëtte Bersee (Netherlands Ministry of Environment), and Jeffrey Sachs (the Earth Institute at Columbia University).

Presented by the New York City Panel on Climate Change and the Green Science & Environmental Policy Discussion Group.

New York City’s head start

Rohit Aggarwala directs the NYC Mayor’s Office of Long-term Planning and Sustainability, which is responsible for PlaNYC 2030, the City’s comprehensive long-term sustainability plan. It’s the framework for the City’s response to climate change, including the NPCC’s and Task Force’s work. This gives Aggarwala an insider’s strategic vantage point from which to survey the subject.

“We have a very big task ahead of us,” he declared. It “requires us all to be realistic and engage intellectually with the challenge of transforming knowledge into action, and particularly widespread action, because that’s the difference.” Doing things on a mass scale is very difficult.

Happily, New York is “already the most environmentally efficient economy and society in the United States,” he reported, and he reviewed some indices. Of all the nation’s transit riders, 55% are in the tri-state region. The average NYC household uses one-third to one-half the electricity of the average American household. Only 6% of the city’s electricity comes from coal. Its carbon footprint is close to a third of the average American’s.

Aggarwala suggested that, because New York has a head start, perhaps “we can in some ways show the way”—demonstrating that a city can enjoy a high quality of life even though most residents don’t own cars, live in large homes, or rely heavily on coal. But, he acknowledged, if you live in parts of the country where 90% of your electricity comes from coal, “you have a very big hill to climb” before you reach New York’s level of performance.

A pragmatic approach

Building on the city’s existing advantages was an obvious initial strategy for PlaNYC. For example, Aggarwala explained, it makes logical sense to direct growth around transit centers, to expand the transit system rather than build more highways, and to rely on energy efficiency to meet growing energy demand.

The City has embraced some counterintuitive moves. As an environmental initiative, it signed a long-term contract to expand a fossil fuel-powered electricity generating station in Queens. Because a state-of-the-art natural gas turbine is twice as efficient as a 30-year-old turbine, the new plant will reduce the city’s total carbon footprint by around 3.5%. “So going carbon neutral ...is not always the right way forward,” he observed. Similarly, “we’re not going straight to electric vehicles; we have to go to hybrids first.” The theme, he said, is starting with what’s most easily justified.

As an environmental initiative, the City signed a long-term contract to expand a fossil fuel-powered electricity generating station.

That pragmatism informs the City’s approach to climate adaptation. In the face of climate risks, “while in the long term public investments can pay off ...in the short term we do often face zero sum games ...and we have to think very carefully about the investments we choose to make,” Aggarwala cautioned. He recounted the City’s 2008 launch of the NYC Panel on Climate Change and NYC Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, and predicted that the plan the Task Force issues in early 2010 will be “state-of-the-art.” It will inform capital planning and adaptation measures.

A significant feature of the City’s approach is that “adaptation does not mean protection,” Aggarwala pointed out. Rather, resilience, including the ability to quickly recover from a severe climate-related event, is the goal.

Weighing tradeoffs

The work of responding to climate change abounds with tradeoffs. Aggarwala illustrated this by discussing a legislative package then pending before the City Council, the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, which had been introduced by the Mayor and the Council Speaker. He characterized it as “commonsense” and “the most important single set of initiatives in PlaNYC.” The plan required owners of existing buildings—responsible for nearly 80% of the city’s carbon footprint—to undertake systematic energy benchmarking and auditing, and upgrades to reduce energy consumption, such as installing more energy-efficient light bulbs or tuning a boiler.

Objections arose. Retrofits might inconvenience tenants. Benchmarking might affect property values. Rent stabilization laws might constrain capital investments. Payback periods of even just a few years might be too long. Etc. Aggarwala said his office was working with stakeholders to try to figure out how to make it easier for them to comply.

(On December 3, the Mayor withdrew the most controversial provision in the package. On December 7 The New York Times published a letter about this cosigned by Aggarwala. On December 9 the Council passed remaining provisions. The Mayor proclaimed the new law “the biggest step the city could take” to reduce carbon emissions. The Times said, it “put the city at the forefront of efforts nationwide to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.”)

Optimizing for one variable is dangerous, particularly in a place like New York City, which is a finely balanced machine.

Many people of good will find themselves thinking about tradeoffs, Aggarwala said, and he cautioned that a short-term tradeoff that optimizes for one thing, like zero carbon, could lead you to unpopular solutions, like relying only on nuclear power. “So optimizing for one variable is a very dangerous thing, particularly ...in a place like New York City,” which is “a finely balanced machine.” If regulations drive the cost of living and working in the city too high, and residents move to less sustainable locales, “the planet’s overall environmental performance is not helped,” he reflected.

Circling back to his initial point, Aggarwala amplified it. Translating knowledge into action on a mass scale is inherently complex, so progress takes time–“whether we’re trying to implement a local sustainability plan or going off to Copenhagen and trying to make a global strategy work. And perhaps we shouldn’t be that surprised that after 17 years we don’t have an answer,” he suggested. “But perhaps the good news is, we’re all still trying.”

The Netherlands mobilizes its response

Henriëtte Bersee is Attaché for the Netherlands Ministry of Environment. Previously she was the Netherlands’ chief negotiator on international climate change agreements. With the December Copenhagen talks looming, in her opening remarks she pointed to a sign of progress: “We have never [before] seen countries like China, India, South Africa, Brazil before really wanting to take responsibility on the issue.”

The Netherlands has been taking responsibility for quite a while. It’s easy to see why: 26% of the country is below sea level, another 29% is susceptible to river flooding, and the catastrophic flood of 1953, which killed some 1,800 people, is an indelible traumatic national memory. It prompted creation of the Delta Commission, which has masterminded decades of investment in protective measures, the Delta Works.

Bersee opened her account of the Netherlands’ response to climate change with the chart above. It’s taken from the UK’s 2007 news-making Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change, which concludes that mitigation is less expensive than adaptation. “For the Netherlands especially,” she pointed out with quiet understatement, “the water is a problem.” The country is surrounded by water; one-quarter of it is below sea level; 70% of its gross national product is produced below sea level, making it “incredibly vulnerable to climate change.” Small in area, and with a population of 16.5 million people, the country is the most densely populated in Europe, and most of its population is urban.

Climate change and the Dutch policy agenda

The Netherlands is on track to meet its Kyoto Protocol target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It now aims to reduce its emissions by 30% by 2020 from 1990 levels. “Whether Copenhagen fails or succeeds we will have to adapt because we want to keep our feet dry,” Bersee said. “Even if we stop emitting altogether today, we will have consequences of climate change.”

Consequently, in 2007 the government appointed a Delta Committee to develop recommendations for protecting the Netherlands from climate change. The basic assumption is that government is responsible for human safety and the integrity of the dikes, but the Commission’s charge goes beyond “water safety” to keeping the country livable. And it entails “a combination of spatial planning and fighting the water,” Bersee said.

“Spatial planning” is a crucial concept. As a New York Times article puts it (emphasis added), it’s “a new policy aimed at giving more space to water through solutions that seek not only to increase safety levels, but also to garner social, environmental, and economic benefits.” Bersee explained, “We hope not to be forced to build a lot of dikes, because ...when the sea level rises 5 meters, how high is your dike? We don’t want to build walls.”

The Delta Committee estimates maximum sea level rise for the end of this century at 1.3 meters (4.27 feet). The country is threatened by its many rivers, too: in the summer, they’re lower, permitting more saltwater intrusion; in the winter, heavier rain makes them swell.

Bersee reviewed a dozen recommendations made by the Delta Committee. Among them: try not to build in vulnerable areas (not easy in a small, densely populated country). Add lots of sand to the vulnerable North Sea coast. Where major rivers from Germany and France converge, construct more room to accommodate water. Protect Rotterdam from flooding from the Rhine, sea level rise, and saltwater intrusion into drinking water. To the extent possible, keep the mouth of the Rhine open for transport and harbor activity; close it when necessary. More dams and dikes will probably have to be built there.

"We will have to adapt because we want to keep our feet dry."

The Committee also recommended that a Delta fund be established. Annual costs for water management were estimated at 1.2 to 1.6 billion euros from 2010-2050 and 0.9 to 1.5 billion from 2050 to 2100. "Is it worth it to keep The Netherlands livable?" Bersee asked. In light of its 600 billion-euro GNP, the answer is yes.

But, Bersee observed, this is a “very cynical” question. “At climate change negotiations [there are] so many vulnerable countries; for instance, islands in the Pacific whose existence is threatened by climate change. And when you make the calculation, probably it’s not worth saving it. And that’s really a very big responsibility that we all have when we look at conferences like Copenhagen.”

Dutch cities act

Rotterdam and Amsterdam are very active on climate change issues, Bersee reported. “There are lots of contacts between New York, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam about mitigation, reducing emissions, and making a city climate proof. Climate-proofing includes trying to avoid building in vulnerable areas; designing buildings in ways that limit heat absorption; exploiting shade and cooling, and “green and blue” construction (using trees, vegetation, and water for a cooling effect); temporarily storing rainfall from intense rain events; increasing disaster preparedness; and building “waterhouses”—literally, floating houses.

Water houses in Rotterdam

The Delta Committee is planning for 100 years, “but we are not certain how fast sea level will rise, how much rain we will have to accommodate ...So the plan is very flexible,” Bersee explained. “But at least we are prepared and we are working on it to keep our people safe.”

All that said, “local adaptation has its limits,” she stated. “We really need an international agreement ...where developed countries agree to reduction targets; developing countries also take a responsibility. And we need finance to support developing countries. The Netherlands is a relatively rich country. We still think we are able to live with the water, live with climate change.” But already, many countries around the world don’t, she added, “and they need our support.”

The world’s cities in peril

As his titles suggest, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, has a global perspective. He brought it to bear at the Academy, praising New York City’s leadership on sustainability and climate issues, and speculating that the new NYC Panel of Climate Change report “will be not only of enormous value to the city but a template for cities around the world.”

Cities around the world are in peril, he warned. Many are located near coasts and on rivers for trade and sustenance, “but those turn out to be very dangerous places in a world of climate change.” Yet people are streaming to the cities in unprecedented numbers as urbanization proceeds apace. More than half the world’s population is now urban.

Referring to the map above, Sachs described worsening hazards: rising sea level, storm surges, extreme weather events including heat waves and prolonged drought, destruction of coastal infrastructure, threats to coastal aquifers, loss of snowmelt and glacier melt. In crowded urban environments, pollutants from transport and energy use interact with warming to intensify health hazards. Infrastructure is vulnerable to massive failures like blackouts.

Alarmingly, climate change is suppressing crops, at the same that demand for food is rising as population grows. Last year’s spike in food prices resulted in “probably a hundred to two hundred million additional deeply hungry people in the world’s cities as the food crisis unfolded alongside the financial crisis,” he reported. In Bangladesh alone, tens of millions of people are at risk of sea level rise, massive storm surges, and increasingly intense typhoons.

Losing ground

“How are we going to deal with all of this?” Sachs asked. “The range of skills ...needed to even understand these challenges and the interconnection among these skills ...is the profound new challenge.” Sustainable development is the greatest source of challenges, but it’s not widely recognized as such. Many crises, such as Somalia and Darfur, are packaged “as crises of politics and ideology,” whereas they’re really the leading edge of environmental catastrophes. We don't talk about hunger and climate. “It’s therefore all the more important that the scientific community help to explain, to document, to teach, and to design the new set of tools that will be needed for this new ...unique age.”

Looking ahead to climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Sachs expressed profound skepticism that a meaningful agreement would be reached, and exasperation that negotiations have been underway for 17 years. At the international level, we’ve failed, he insisted, “to get these processes right.” Observing matters at close range at the UN has persuaded him that we don’t have the right strategy: we deal with climate issues as political issues more than as technical issues; we take a negotiating rather a problem-solving approach. “The negotiators are diplomats, and the experts are nowhere around.”

Closer to home, in 17 years the U.S. Congress “has not voted one piece of legislation to mitigate or even to adapt to climate change.” That the United States now has a president who believes climate change is important is “a great breakthrough,” Sachs acknowledged, and he’s announced target reductions in carbon emissions: 17% by 2020, and 83% by 2050. But no feasible plan exists for achieving them, and we have a political system completely dominated by special interests, with no systematic scientific rationale for decisions, Sachs charged. All that matters is getting to 60 votes, he added, and the timetable for enacting legislation is ever deferred.

“We are not winning this battle. That’s our most inconvenient truth.”

The fact is, Sachs stated flatly, “We are not winning this battle ...That’s our most inconvenient truth of all.” Despite Al Gore’s Nobel Prize, massive public education effort, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, and climate shocks around the world, “maybe the financial crisis has made it even more inconvenient to believe this is real,” he speculated. A recent Pew survey found that one-third of Americans believe in human-induced climate change; two years ago roughly one-half did. That, along with powerful vested interests, is preventing political action, Sachs believes.

An “extraordinarily dangerous” historical moment

But another, deeply troubling factor is at work, as well. It concerns the role of science and society. Sachs dismissed the recent controversy surrounding the publication of climate scientists’ private emails as a minor event. Far more serious is that we’ve been living “in a society that is to a significant extent not just unscientific but antiscientific. And we’re living in a very peculiar time where that anti-science is aggressively manipulated by powerful organizations and powerful interests.” He cited the example of Exxon Mobil, then turned to The Wall Street Journal. Its editorials distort climate science, he charged. They’re not arguing about climate science; instead, they’re saying climate science is a global conspiracy driven by money-hungry scientists. The Journal matters, he explained, because it has the largest circulation in the country; it’s read by the entire business community every day; it influences lobbyists and Congress. His critique was scorching:

His plea for a remedy was heartfelt:

Sachs recounted his efforts, over seven years, to engage Journal editors in a discussion of climate change. All failed. “So while they editorialize about scientific accountability,” they’re not accountable, he contended. He asked for help in finding ways to reach a measure of civil discussion and scientific debate, “rather than the kind of anti-science baiting that can do our society in.”

A question from the audience prompted a less pessimistic view. “We’ve lost a basic compass,” Sachs reflected, but Scandinavian nations demonstrate it’s possible “to have capitalism, a social conscience, and an environmental commitment.” They prove there’s a way forward. “We don’t have to dream of a system that doesn’t exist ...It’s a matter of getting back to basic values.”

Right now, we’re in “an extraordinarily dangerous” moment, he repeated, but we can’t afford to lose hope. And in fact around the world the quality of political leadership on average is high, and concern about these issues is very high, particularly among young people. “And there’s nothing impossible about this challenge. It’s actually in some ways surprisingly modest if we direct ourselves in the right way.” But we must overcome divisions and restore our social contract.