New York City Panel on Climate Change 2019 Report Chapter 9: Perspectives on a City in a Changing Climate 2008–2018

Abstract

Cities experience multiple environmental shifts, stresses, and shocks—such as air and water pollution—and a variety of extreme events simultaneously and continuously. Current urban programs have focused on limiting the impacts of these conditions through a portfolio of multifaceted strategies, such as regulations and codes, management and restoration projects, and citizen engagement. Global climate change represents a new environmental dynamic to which cities now have to respond. While global climate change by definition has impacts worldwide, residents and managers of cities, like New York, typically perceive changes in their own local environments. In most cities, temperature is warming with increasingly hotter and longer heatwaves, and heavier downpours are leading to more frequent inland flooding. In coastal cities, sea levels are rising, exacerbating coastal flooding. Analyzing and understanding the impacts of climate change on cities is important because of the dramatic growth in urban populations throughout the world. An estimated nearly 4.0 billion people reside in urban areas, accounting for 52% of the world’s population (UN, 2017). That percentage will increase dramatically in the coming decades as almost all of the growth to take place up to 2050 will be in urban areas (UN, 2017). The New York City metropolitan region (NYMR)—the five boroughs (equivalent to counties) of New York City and the adjacent 26 counties in the states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut—is an ideal model of an urban agglomeration. Approximately 8.6 million people live in the five boroughs and more than 15 million people live in the neighboring smaller cities, towns, and villages (City of New York, 2018a; US Census, 2017). The population of the five boroughs is projected to add 1 million people by 2030, while the total region is projected to reach 26.1 million (NYTC, 2015). The original work on science-based assessments of climate change impacts in the NYMR began with Climate Change and A Global City: The Metropolitan East Coast Regional Assessment of Potential Climate Variability and Change (MEC Report) (Rosenzweig and Solecki, 2001a; Rosenzweig and Solecki, 2001b); (see also, Gornitz et al. (2002) and Major, (2003)).a This foundational work laid the groundwork for a