Girding for the 100-year storm in New York City

Katherine Jose in Capital New York: ..."I would say three or four years ago there was—and this a general statement, not specific to New York—the emphasis was on mitigation; in other words, reducing our contribution to climate change," David Bragdon, head of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, told Capital in an interview. "It's only more recently that policy makers are acknowledging what scientists have known, which is that even if we magically stop emissions tomorrow—if we were successful in all these mitigation efforts, there's still effects that are happening already."

Acknowledgement of the science meant that a great deal of the chapter on climate change in the 2011 revised PlaNYC is devoted to sea-level rise, partly coming from recommendations of the New York Panel on Climate Change, convened for expressly this sort of thing. The panel believes that the sea level will rise as much as two to five inches in the 2020s, and reach the double digits as early as the 2050s.

"I think it's not understood how serious the situation will be in coastal areas and what the costs will be to society at large," Professor Klaus Jacob of Columbia's Earth Institute, a member of the panel, said in an interview. "This will go into any urban area that's on the coast into tens of billions of dollars."

It is, somewhat obviously, more exciting and uplifting to green the city and spare future generations the depredations of environmental change than it is to contemplate the inevitability of a serious flooding disaster in our lifetime. But despite the great deal of research and information that has emerged in the last several years, Jacob said, "greening" projects are still proceeding largely without heed of potential disaster. Government bureaucracies, even those that operate in the generally forward-thinking Bloomberg administration, aren't always quick to act on new research that outlines new risks.

Another key initiative of the Bloomberg administration has been the transformation of the city's waterfronts. It's been a boom on the waterfront and the plans are only just beginning to be realized. None of them, Jacob said, take sea-level rise into account....

The High Line in New York City, shot by Beyond My Ken, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported