Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Nancy Grimm: Now I have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker, Dr. William Solecki from Hunter College. You can take that down and—in New York. I’ve worked with Bill over the past year and a half on the U.S. national climate assessment, and my experience has been that he has a deep understanding of the critical challenges that cities face in a changing climate. You can all read Bill’s bio in the program, and I encourage you to do so, but I want to point out some particulars, some salient points.

First, Bill is a geographer by training and by profession. He’s been an important force in both the international panel on climate change, intergovernmental panel on climate change, and nationally in the U.S. national climate assessment in arguing for the importance of considering both impacts and adaptation for cities and climate change. He’s been a leader in this area, co-editing the recent Climate Changing Cities Assessment that was published last year or the year before. I think it was last year. He is on several important committees and co-founded the Urban Climate Change Research Network.

In Bill’s talk today, he’s going to bring a perspective from critical transitions theory to the challenge of urban resilience to climate change, with the specific example of Hurricane Sandy and impacts on New York City. If you notice, on the New York Times front page this morning, there was an article about extreme events. Everything is sort of converging here to be a very appropriate speaker given our theme, where we look to future challenges for central Arizona in terms of urban sustainability. Will you please all join me in welcoming Bill Solecki, who will be speaking on ‘Transitions in Urban Environmental Systems: Lessons from New York City and Hurricane Sandy.’ Bill?

[clapping]

Bill Solecki: Okay. I have to look at today’s paper. I didn’t realize the—I haven’t looked at today’s Times yet. First of all, thank you, for Nancy and for others who have inviting me here to say a few words. It’s always very, always a great experience to come to Phoenix, to come to Tempe, to ASU and particularly CAP-LTR. I was mentioning to Nancy that I was here about ten years ago. I think you guys were still in the shopping mall, the old converted shopping mall. As I mentioned to her as well, what is going on here with the CAP-LTR is really international. You know this already. But an international sort of beacon, in terms of the kind of work that could go on in an urban place to sort of understand environmental change. Questions of monitoring indicators of change, issues connected to sustainability and resilience. It’s always, for that, it’s a great honor to say a few words to you.

The other thing I want to mention, this talk is kind of an interesting process. Hurricane Sandy hit New York and the extended metro region at the end of October. As an academic, it’s, this is sort of, I think many of you guys are sensitive to this issue. You both have academic hats and involved in the policy arena. That sort of tension and issue has never, have become more evident over the last couple of months. Just in terms of engagement with local stakeholders asking what to do, where should we go from here, but at the same time thinking about it as an academic, as someone who’s trying to set Sandy into this larger envelope of history, and how, let’s say, extreme events affect policy issues or changes in terms of vulnerability and exposure in a community.

The particular thing that I’ll mention is that I’m also the co-chair of the New York City panel on climate change. This was something that was first brought together a couple of years ago, and we put forward a statement about what the city could do with respect to what were the key risks the city was facing. This is particularly in New York City. Then, what were some adaptation opportunities. It wasn’t an adaptation plan, but that sort of effort has, that’s something we delivered to the city. They have incorporated it, and changed it, as they will. Now, after Sandy, there’s a very urgent effort to restart the MPCC, do a next round of that assessment process. They’re now in a very tight six-month schedule to try to develop a new resilience plan in response to Hurricane Sandy.

In terms of the issues and how I’ll phrase them, they both, I’ll try to set them in historical context a little bit as well as sort of like the nitty-gritty, what happened today or yesterday. What’s going on. I was supposed to be on a conference call later today, as example, looking at this New York City panel on climate change. It’s an interesting mixed picture, but again, it’s an exciting experience.

This is the topic, here, of discussion. Let’s see, what’s playing? Whoops! No. Which way? That way. Okay. Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy. I’m not going to go too much into the climatological components of it, other than the fact that it was a very large storm. There were several interesting elements to it, particularly that the most important aspect was its size and its extensive wind area. It extended all the way into Chicago, if you probably are familiar, some of you might be, the stories of 20 foot swells on Lake Michigan flooding Lakeshore Drive. It was that far as an extent.

There wasn’t a lot of rain with it, so it wasn’t a major rain event, with respect to flooding, inland flooding particularly. Coastal flooding, yes, of course, and that was the big issue. Record storm surge. It hit right into that little apex there, right in through the New York City harbor, causing massive storm surge. It changed the, things immediately with respect to how people were connecting with the event.

Obviously, one of the huge issues was the blackouts, and the extended blackouts, people without power. I’ll talk—there was, within the extended metro region, there were eight million customers, not individuals, but customers, without power. Throughout the entire northeast, about eight million customers. Pretty widespread. But the interesting issue is how that process sort of played out.

Then of course another graphic image of that was that the coastal inundation—for those that might be familiar or not with places like along the Jersey shore or Long Island, fairly high level of intense development. Uniform, there aren’t, for the most part, it’s developed, a lot of smaller, larger homes that are multi-family or smaller apartment buildings. But there was a significant amount of inundation in these areas, and of course that’s been one of the hot spots in terms of impacts.

In terms of what does all this mean and where does it go and what are the implications of it moving forward, one of the the things that we’ve been talking about in the New York metro region is, what are some of the basic metrics? How does our understanding of the storm change over time as the weeks and days have passed? What are the most important issues? In some ways, obviously the governors in the region have been comparing it to Katrina. Good old Governor Christie—I live in New Jersey, so I can knock him a little bit—he’s saying that we’re now, Hurricane Katrina folks got their money in seven days, we’ve been waiting 70 days. He’s, there are all these sort of metrics, and of course Cuomo, Mayor—Governor Cuomo in New York State said “This is going to be more damaging that maybe, economically damaging, than Katrina.” So it’s all these metrics.

I think the other kind of arching, kind of theme to think about is how do these two storms differ, or how does our understanding of extreme events, how has it shifted from 2005 with Katrina to 2012 with Hurricane Sandy? To prelude this a little bit, I think the big thing, obviously there was a little bit of discussion of climate change in the Katrina, but also Katrina was a nested set of failures. The levees, local government responses, ineffective social networks and so forth led to devastation among various populations.

In Sandy, the dialogue, the discourse has been much more toward the issue of climate change. These are just some basic comparisons, and I think the big thing to think about—obviously, storm surge is one of the key damaging elements. If you look at past Christian, Mississippi, if you’ve driven along those coasts, you know stuff is right on the coast. That was supposedly the highest storm surge, roughly double what you saw for Sandy. But obviously it’s a location where it occurred. It was about, at lower Manhattan it almost 14 feet. That was about four feet above the most recent storm, which was Hurricane Donna in 60. Then it was certainly several feet above what they think possibly was the storm of record.

These are the huge issues. Then you telescope through some of the numbers, in terms of the number of buildings and structures damaged. The amount of damage itself as you probably know, it’s very difficult to identify, but it’s probably going to get somewhere in the range of 100 billion. This is the estimate that was put forward in December. And the extensiveness. Then, one of the things you’ve seen over time is the understanding of Sandy and what it has meant has changed from the sort of all-out, try to get re-establish basic urban lifelines to a more focused, try to help those more impacted communities. Particularly those along the shore.

Then, sort of set in this larger discussion about what to do next. The analogy, maybe you’re familiar with this too, if you’re in a car crash or something and you, the ambulance takes you away and you have multiple injuries, unfortunately, right? You have some scrapes and bruises and the obvious thing is to deal with those immediate things and then start to think about the long-term, then the more longer lasting injuries remain, and then the idea of what to do next is where we are now.

What does Hurricane Sandy mean? What are the implications? This raises up whole sets of questions. What does it reveal about exposure and vulnerability? What does it mean about disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation? Will it signal a change in policy? The way I’ve phrased those kinds of questions is in that larger issue of how things change. What I want to do at this moment is segue a little bit into some of this more academic or framing issue of transitions. There’s been a lot of literature regarding the issue of change, both within the context of ecosystems and other sorts of systems.

In the context of ecosystems, there’s a rich literature about this notion of how systems have a certain level of resilience within them and certain amounts of change, or certain perturbations or other external factors, can motivate a certain level of change. In some cases, you would expect a large change, let’s say, if you’re thinking of a wetland, a coastal wetland, and you have a large flooding even, that might be a shock to that particular coastal wetland, but it will eventually be able, given its resilience, to recover along some level of something similar to what it was in some pre-existing moment.

In other cases, the resilience of the system might mean a small change could manifest a large change in the system, but it would still be able to recover. Of course, there are other examples. These are defined as these critical transitions, where you could have this abrupt, nonlinear shift, where a small change could result in some sort of dramatic transformation of a system, to such a state that it could not easily recover to its prior state.

That’s been, and again, you’re all probably familiar at least broadly with that kind of argument. What I’ve been doing and thinking about, and others as well, have been trying to say okay, how does this sort of framework, what does this allow us to say with respect to systems that we see in cities? Both coupled natural and human systems as well as more human-dominated systems, even like the transportation system, as example.

These are some of the issues that I’ve been thinking about. I’m sorry about all the words; I basically told you what the slide said. Really what I want to do at this point is take the thought and the piece of Hurricane Sandy and then start to ask a set of questions about what can we infer when we use this literature about transitions, about how the rebuilding process, or the recovery process of Sandy will look like.

Also, what that might mean in terms of our capacity to respond to other, future extreme events. It’s just some things to think about here. This notion of tipping points and associated transitions. Can we see this in both in the urban systems that are present within cities as well as in the policy regimes that govern them, the management of disaster in cities? Are there early warning signals? I mean, this is one of the advantages of this sort of question. Are there early warning signals of a transition? Do we, can we understand what that might look like?

Also, are there ways of encouraging positive transitions? Let’s say if there’s some degraded system state, can we adjust it? I can give you some examples in New York where people are thinking about this. A lot of it has to do with oyster restoration in places like Jamaica Bay. Can we motivate a positive transition, where suddenly, in a situation where you have very little oyster growth and reproduction, you can have great oyster growth and reproduction?

The rationale here, as I’ve mentioned, is to connect with some of this discussion that’s rather rich and interesting literature. Again, assuming you’re familiar with some of this, with respect to—whoops, sorry—how complex systems respond to change and whether or not their responses are linear, in terms of a small process or small impact will result in a similar-level change, a large impact will result in a large change, or are these other examples where a small shift might result in a large change? Are there non-linear shifts that take place? What I would argue is that cities have a lot of these complex systems, a lot of coupled, complex systems and that this process could afford a nice opportunity to look at some of these kinds of questions.

Okay. I’m gonna move over some of this stuff a little bit, so, cuz I want to get to more the stuff about Hurricane Sandy. Then if we need to, we can dive back into some of this literature. As I said, there’s been a lot of interesting stuff recently about environmental transitions in a range of different specters, a range of different application areas. The warning sign issues is something that’s of particular interest to a lot of policy makers and the like.

In terms of how we can look at transitions in cities, I mean, you can start to think of this process, and there’s lots of different examples, maybe from your own experience, where there have been these moments of change, sometimes rather dramatic, in cities. I just sort of tossed up some examples that I’ve gleaned from the literature. Some we’re familiar with, but also reflect this notion of maybe a dramatic shift, where it reaches a tipping point. Demographic transitions, white flight, as example. Or even rapid change in land use.

I was reading a story, one of my favorite books ever if you want to read a nice story about urban land use change. Must be two guys from Brooklyn, but they’re both in Iowa. It’s called Of Cabbages and Kings County. It’s this great story of the collapse of the agricultural economy in Kings County, which is basically Brooklyn today, in the 1850s, 1860s. It was basically the agricultural economy of that county. Kings County and Queens County, where Kennedy Airport—those were the two major agriculturally producing counties in the United States for several decades, in terms of the value of production. The latter part of the 19th, early 20th century.

What happened is that a lot of the agriculture was maintained by these extended Dutch families, the old Dutch settlement families. They were holding on and holding on very tightly to dramatic changes in land value, increase of development pressures. Within a period of about 10 to 15 years, the extended network eventually made a kind of general decision that we need to do something different. You see this wholesale selling out of property. There was this dramatic transformation that took place over this relatively short amount of period, or transition.

Again, lots of words, and I’ve spoken to much of this already, but if you look at this process of transition, often times it emerges from various stresses within systems. These stresses then emerge over time, eventually reaching some particular crisis stage. There are often times solutions that are put forward but they’re fragmentary, where they don’t necessarily solve the, quote-unquote solve the problem and exacerbate the, a next round.

Often times, these crises are, or particularly the environmental ones, are connected to this question if we, if this issue isn’t resolved, then it might threaten the economic viability, the opportunities for growth in the city. Then if you look at some of these stories, some of these histories, that often times these tipping points are frequently passed and transitions do occur.

The notion of these transitions, again, thinking of a city, could be at various scales. Both local, within a particular neighborhood, or across a much larger area. Then the other, last thing, is that sometimes the resolutions of these crises lead to other issues on down the line. I’ll give you some more examples, but these are just some general thoughts.

In terms of what I’ve been thinking about, particularly looking at Sandy and in other contexts, are these urban environmental systems. I’ll just paint them for a moment, looking at natural, things that are natural-dominated systems, urban wetlands; human-dominated systems, particularly in the urban context, which would be transport; then these coupled ones. The one that’s been written most about is water supply.

These are some of the illustrations, and certainly there are others, but there’s a lot of, as I said, rich literature. I’ve been particularly interested in some of the work by Martin Schaeffer and others. These are some of the illustrations from his work. It’s a critical, book on critical transitions. These are the different models that I’ve been highlighting to you. This is equilibrium line for a particular system.

You could have a large change, so this is our, let’s say our wetland area. We had a huge flood. That could shift the system to a different system state, but given its resilience, it would be able to, the thought would be, it would remain at that general equilibrium line, possibly recovering to its previous state. Another example is where there’s a certain lower level of resilience and it could result in a small forcing, could result in a significant shift, although not a paradigmatic shift in the system. Then other cases where you have the catastrophic bifurcation or critical transition, where a small shift could lead to a large change.

Again, we see these in the literature in many different contexts. There have been other models of this. Mark Pelling in the U.K. has been using the words transition. There’s been various adaptation cycles. Lots of different phrasing. Of course, connected to, this is the model that again I assume that many are familiar with, the Holling-Gunderson model adaptive cycle model. Looking at this notion of growth, some sort of event causing a release in the system, reorganization and then continued growth through exploitation and conservation.

This also has been applied in, this is obviously emerging out of the ecosystems literature, but it’s also increasing the context being applied to public policy arena, as well as the development cycle. I’ve seen an interesting study recently on the city of Charleston, applying this particular model as well. There’s a lot of different perspectives on this transition model.

What this leads to is a whole set of questions. Again, I’ll pose these and as we move into some of the Hurricane Sandy discussion, we can reflect back on them. I’ll just go through them. When does a system response become non-linear? In what, what sort of examples can we illustrate? When does a system function as a complex system as opposed to a simple system? What are the, what is the relative role in any particular environmental crisis, urban environmental crisis, of embedded within that, human systems, natural systems, or these more directly human-natural coupled systems? What is the role of cross-scale interaction?

Of course, there’s been a lot of work in this. The phrase in the literature, this notion of panarchies. The idea is that you could have, again, in the urban scale, a crisis within a particular community or neighborhood within a particular municipality within, in a particular region, or let’s say for a water supply system, you could have it within one component of the water supply system cascading to other components of the water supply system. What are opportunities for policy interventions? This is the crucial question that I think is relevant for this kind of discussion.

One of the things I’ve looked at at least a little bit to try to get some grounding on this idea is an example of the New York City water supply system, and how that played out as a, can we find evidence of critical transitions or of transitions in general? These are some of the questions that lead me to that investigation. What, can we find evidence of a transition? Were there crises leading up to the transition? Are there any early warning signals that might be relevant? What’s the relevance of this process to urban environmental change? How did the resolution of this crisis impact urban environmental change? How can these be translated, and this is the, again, tag into Sandy, connected to climate action?

I’m going to do this part a little bit more brief and—although it’s very fun—and then to go on to the Sandy stuff. What we have here is a system, or a process, that started out as this. This is lower Manhattan, roughly as you see here, the 1770, 1780s. This was the major supply of fresh water for the city of New York at that time. It was called the Collect Pond. This was the city of New York, nestled down in lower Manhattan. If you’re familiar with some of the geography, this is the very beginning of City Hall Park. This is actually right behind the current city hall in New York City. Again, if you’re familiar with that, you think of city hall as being way down town, almost at the Battery. But that was actually still at the northern edge of the city at that time.

Of course, by the 1950s, 1960s, you have this kind of system, which can bring water, convey water about 150 miles. Not in terms of western examples so far, but supplies drinking water every day to about nine million people. A huge and extensive system. What was the process? Again, this issue, that every city has to face this issue, how to provide water for its residents. With that, there are these stresses that emerge and then crises, the challenge is to resolve the crisis.

If you look at the New York City water system, it was just fraught with one problem after another, literally, for decades. In fact, it was this unending state of crisis that could not be fully resolved under the current, under the paradigm that was present. There were private companies that failed, private carters, continuous conflicts over water quality and water supply. A whole set of socioeconomic tension, equity issues. The poor could get water brought in—sorry, the poor could not, the wealthy could. No sewer systems. A huge mess, right?

Adding on to this, there was this dramatic period of rapid growth in the city with the opening of the Erie Canal. Suddenly, I mean, the city had always been growing, but then it sort of sparked with this huge expansion of the port and trading, which then set in motion this penultimate, if you want to look at it that way, crisis in this system. What was the issue? One was that you’re bringing in a huge amount of foreign goods and with that you’re introducing disease vectors into the environment. There was that crisis. With that, the lack of potable water became an issue in responding to these various epidemics.

The other crisis that really turned the handle, so to speak—and this is the notion of extreme events motivating policy shifts—throughout the late 1820s and early 1830s there was a series of ever-larger fires emerging. It’s an interesting part of this process, why were there so many fires? Part of it was the changing geography of the city itself, and how it was organized. It was becoming ever more a large port city, and what did you need? You need larger and larger storage facilities. There was huge warehouses that were being built throughout the water’s edge. It was these, this new emerging mercantile elite that were building these structures to store all the goods. Guess what? These things were mostly made out of wood. They didn’t have, if a fire did occur, they didn’t have appropriate water to put out the fire. It’s not only the lack of potable water and lack of drinking water etcetera, but it was also the lack of water to deal with this particular type of risk.

What that result was in a dramatic push to create the Croton system. I can go through the details of this at some other point, but basically it was seen as an engineering marvel and there was this huge parade, five-mile parade, as the water started to flow. But the interesting thing about, what exactly happened, and how did this illustrate a, what I would, in a broad cut, possibly put forward as a critical transition.

Basically the system had been stuck and further put under stress for many decades. It was obvious that this existing system for water supply was ever more ineffective in meeting the demand. One of the things that was the sticking point in any kind of change was a political alliance that had emerged between a couple of groups. One, the private property, or the private water supply managers and the northern Manhattan land owners.

Here’s northern Manhattan here. Now, remember the city is down here. The landowners up here. Their vested interest was to have New York, which was down here, as messes up as possible, because that means that the wealthy would move out to their large land holdings to the northern part of the island. The same way, the private water conveyors didn’t want to lose their ability to control it.

What you see here is, it was basically as that was solidified, another parallel structure emerged, of this new wealth, a mercantile class, the folks who were building all the warehouses and were losing all the property. Those folks made alliances with folks in Albany and outside, and it’s through that coalition that they were eventually able to wrest control away from the water conveyors and create a public system of water distribution. That, in turn, dramatically changed the nature of the system and set it forward on a new course.

There are other examples, and I’m not going to, where we can see other cascading crises emerging within systems. This is a water quality example from the 1990s that was set in this Croton system, which was built as, with great fanfare in the 1840s. By the 1990s the water quality had started to decline, and that set in motion a huge re-imagining of the system itself. I’ll come back to that example.

I’ll come back to these, these are different illustrations of how that resilience can shift. These are adapted from Schaeffer and Walker and others who have been illustrating these kinds of examples of resilient shifts.

What I’ve tried to do is in a limited way fashion this example of the New York City water supply as one of these crises that the city met and responded to and what the implications of that were. The nature of that as a transition, as a system transition, and how then we can look back, look through the city’s history, and from my perspective start to touch in on several other similar crises, each one with their own interesting history, where it was this long lead up period connected to this questioning of the forward economic movement of the city, where it was embedded in the underlying equity issues, economic tensions of the city, and were resolved in particular ways, to both promote further growth, but in some cases also facilitating more issues on down the line.

An example of mobility and congestion. There’s a very rich history, if you were teleported back to New York in 1900, New York was mostly the island of Manhattan, a little bit into the Bronx and so forth. It actually just been created as a huge, five-borough entity. One of the rational modernist planning of the era was that we need to remove the congestion of Manhattan. If Manhattan and New York is going to continue to grow, to be a vital economic power, in this case the U.S. and increasingly the world, we need to create a rational planning effort to decongest Manhattan.

What did that mean? First, it meant the dramatic building of a public transit, of subways, out into potato fields in Queens. But also, just after it meant the building of extensive highway systems. We hear, Robert Moses, the power broker, emerging as the implementer of this vision. Of course, now we look back at Moses as someone who brought the automobile to the city, not only New York, but to cities in general. But of course, it was introduced with this notion of modernist movement toward a logical, rational city.

The question that leaves me, and I will tell you, I mean, not to get, not to give you some company secrets or whatever, this is part of an older talk that was certainly way present before Hurricane Sandy. This, that notion of whether or not—my pointer just went out—whether or not climate change is going to be the challenge of this decade for New York was something that I had put on there previously. Okay. All right.

We’ve kind of been through, collapsing this a little bit, these crises emerge over, take a long time to define, understand. They emerge through these underlying tensions, resolutions push things away to sometime into the future, and things frequently get worse before they get better. How’s that for being optimistic, right?

All right. Okay. Let’s talk to Sandy. One of the things I think is particularly important—again, these are framing things. This is why I’m said I’m slightly schizophrenic cuz it’s not only me as an academic but me as someone who has the ear of policy makers. One of the things I think about, it’s, there’s a historian who’s, an urban historian whose work I’ve liked, a guy named Thomas Bender. One of his things is about that cities aren’t finished. This sounds like probably many have written about this, but it’s the notion that we always have this opportunity to rebuild the city and to, it’s never quite done. It’s always in a state of becoming.

Then the question is, how do we integrate, if that’s the case, how do we integrate climate change challenges and opportunities into this continually building process? What strategies are best to make the region more resilient and adaptive as well as promote climate change mitigation? Part of that, part of the answer lies in understanding what kind of future we want and the actions and policies necessary to create that future. This is like this broad visioning thing. This is an interesting piece of work. It’s a dystopian view 5,000 years on. It’s an illustration of this notion of a future, and obviously this is not a future that we want, so how do we create the future that we want?

What did we know for New York? We certainly know that New York metro region was one of the most vulnerable places to large storm events in the United States, by many metrics. It has a tremendous number of assets, infrastructure, economic networking, populations. Right by the water’s edge. Not rocket science. There have been a lot of frequent events. These are slightly older, but we had a, in the last several years, and of course you cannot attribute any one particular even to climate change, but these reflective of what conditions under which climate change might occur. You see how quickly I can roll that off my tongue? I’ve said that many times.

We had this really freak rainstorm event in 2007 when it just dumped a huge amount of rain into the city subways and closed the subways down. That happens on average every three years. We get a huge rain event. But what happened in 2007, 2008 we had three of these events in one year. Suddenly the folks that run the subways were like, “We gotta do something different. Something is happening.” Then of course we had Hurricane Irene last year, which was a huge soaking event. Inland flooding, you’re probably familiar with Vermont and upstate New York and suburban New York. Very small storm surge, but it did give, it was the first time that there had actually been evacuation order. We already knew that there was a significant amount of risk here.

Of course, there’s a lot of low elevation. New York is basically a set of islands, stretched out. Only the Bronx is part of the mainland of the United States. A lot of it is low elevation. Okay, just a few feet of elevation here, this is Jamaica Bay. Here’s the airport, again. All these places, Breezy Point, the Rockaways over here. Coney Island, Staten Island, these are all phenomenally low elevation places. Very subject to storm surge.

If you look at some of the inundation, you can see, this was from Hurricane, this was the observed inundation from Hurricane Sandy. Quite dramatic. These are the places that were touched by water. This is a product of some field observations and the rest going out after the storm. You can see there was fairly significant, those are talk back a little bit, but that’s the Breezy Point community and the Rockaways, Coney Island that were heavily impacted.

Now, interestingly enough, just to give a reference, I’ve done a lot of work with respect to some of the climate modeling and storm surge that we would, you expect to see—or, sorry, sea-level rise—with storm surge. This is one product that we developed, the New York City panel on climate change. This is a rapid ice melt scenario for the 2050. If you had a one percent flood event with about two feet of sea-level rise, which is the projection under that scenario, that’s the inundation that you would have with a one percent flood, or one-in-100-year flood.

As you can see, if you overlap the two, it’s, it doesn’t mean anything per se, but there’s an interesting correlation, illustration of the kinds of inundation that we saw with Sandy. I’ll talk more about this notion of scenarios and sea-level rise and what that means for the future, but this is some example.

The question is, how do we move forward from this and what are some of the various aspects? I’m going to use the remaining time that I have to try to tease some of those pieces together and ask that question: is this a tipping point? This is one my most, to me, this is a powerful picture. Again, they’re rebuilding the 9/11 site, the World Trade Center site, and it’s a construction site. At that night, on October 28th, it became a cascading waterfall with water flooding into the memorial.

Okay. One of the things I think is very profound, that I kind of highlighted a little bit earlier, is that the discussion from Sandy, with Sandy, is very different from what we saw with Katrina, if we want to use that as a rough bench mark. After a particular disaster response is usually on addressing failures, doing some cost-benefit analysis, trying to figure out how to deal with future risk based on, with the assumption that we’re dealing with a relatively, maybe some dynamic equilibrium in that baseline, but not a directional. But Hurricane Sandy has really been quite different. It’s been discussed in the context of climate change and it’s really talking about this movement from disaster recovery to disaster rebuilding.

It’s very interesting. We had Jane Levchenko from NOAA come to one of our events. She highlighted this notion that we need to go away from the word of recovery, because we really can’t use that notion, of recovering to something in the past. We have to rebuild to something in the future. I think that’s an important way we need to think about this notion of using every opportunity to rebuild in this context of an ever more climate dynamic environment.

Right. The other thing that’s important here, the way that has been discussed so far in New York, is like other urban environmental crises, so if you’ll think back to the water supply issue or the congestion problem in New York City, it’s increasingly being discussed that if we don’t do something about it now, it’s going to get worse and worse in the future. It’s not getting better. We have to think in a different way.

One of the things that drives some of this is some of these projections. This is some of the product of some of the work that I’ve been connected with. This is some of these models, with—I can talk more about the various scenarios, but the initial scenario work that we did on this was, came out of the AR4, the IPCC fourth assessment report. This is a few years back. In process, we recognize that model as probably a little too conservative. Then there was an adaptation put forward, something called a rapid ice melt scenario, which is increasingly seen as probably more consistent with the kind of sea-level rise that we might see in a place like New York.

What that means is that by the 2080s, you can have somewhere in the range of about four and a half feet of sea-level rise. The standard rate there has been sea-level rise in the region historically, and it’s been about one inch per decade. Right? The 20th century, you had about ten inches or so. A little bit more than ten inches of sea-level rise. With climate change, the assumption is under this kind of worst-case scenario you could have by the 2080s about four and a half feet. By 2100, it be, the angle, it becomes a slightly higher here, you could have closer to six feet under current scenarios.

What that means in terms of planning is that hundred-year flood, that benchmark FEMA understand of we have to manage for the hundred-year flood plain, for the one percent flood plain, under this kind of scenario, we could have that, just doing a very simple bathtub approach with the elevation, an event of a magnitude to reach that elevation line could happen every one to three years. Okay?

Of course, if we have a stronger event, you’re going to have that much more inundation. It’s basically just saying the baseline is shifting, instead of like having the flood occurring when the water’s at this level, by the end of this century, it will be this level. When you think about lower Brooklyn, places that I showed you on the map, what that translates from horizontal—sorry, from vertical to horizontal forward movement of a storm surge.

That’s why you get that rather dramatic forward movement inundation. Okay. What we’ve been looking at, what I’ve been trying to ask is how does this, how does Sandy connect with some of these issues of environmental transitions? There are lots of different ways to think about this, both with respect to vulnerability and exposure—there’s some really interesting things that emerge—as well as this equation of stress, crisis and transition. There are a number of different realms that we can look at.

Then, I’m going to go back for a moment to speak to this one, vulnerability and exposures. What, this is, again, shouldn’t come as a great shock. In a place like New York, there’s a lot of tightly-coupled, nested systems in which the possibility of cascade failure is quite clear. A lot of that has, there have been examples of it with blackouts over extended, large areas as example. But here we saw a really good example of how these networks failed in this cascade fashion. There were a range of them. Some of them, the electricity we’ve talked about. Transport, the subways, the subway tunnels were flooded.

That basically effectively cut Manhattan off from parts of Brooklyn and Queens for about 48, about 72 hours. Other than walking across the bridge. In terms of transit, obviously you could drive—what happened is, I mean, not to get too much into, there’s so many little stories in here, I don’t want us to get waylaid. The subways went down. People still, two, three days later wanted to get to work. What do they do? Well, I’ll get in my car and drive. Huge gridlock. Suddenly the system breaks down. It was phenomenal gridlock in the city. Then there had to be these responses to that in terms of having, closing off bridges, having high-capacity vehicles. All this stuff done on the fly, but it was this cascading effect starting to emerge.

There were a range of other sorts of examples, even things that aren’t so spectacular but are obviously critically important like stocking pharmacies and drug supply for the city. I’m going to talk about another particular example in one moment. Also, the other thing to recognize is that the, we think that the most impacts were right along the coast. In fact, that was the case, but we see also that there were other impacts throughout the region. In some ways, it was a very uneven geography. Something would be impacted at one location and set off a chain of reactions in another location.

This is the transit stuff. I’m going to hop and skip over this a little bit, but this was some of the work that was done in previous efforts that I was leading, looking at flood inundation areas and critical transit infrastructure. We documented all these tunnels would likely flood in a large storm event. Guess what? They did.

We knew that this issue was coming, and now the question is how to respond to that. I’m kind of come back to this. The cascades I think are kind of interesting and it was the blackout was a particularly interesting example. It’s something that really wasn’t well thought out, even in the work that I had done previously with the climate assessment. We had, there was a Con Edison substation, a, one of the energy utilities in the region. They were prepared for a storm surge. They said, “We’re going to prepare our facility for a storm surge. We’re going to make it at the, we’re going to build a barrier around these critical infrastructure that’s at ten feet. That the record form Hurricane Donna in 1960. If it’s higher than that, wow, we’re in trouble.”

Guess what? Actually, I’m sorry. It was eleven and a half feet. Made a mistake. They made it about a foot and a half higher than what the previous storm surge record in recent times was. Guess what? The storm surge was about two feet higher than that, right? Two feet of difference in a substation in the mid part of Manhattan, once that was over topped, that set off a whole cascade of electrical failures throughout the southern part of the island. That’s what you saw those images. All that happened largely at that one substation, right? In terms of vulnerabilities, you can highlight that.

What did that do? Suddenly people were without power. That had happened before, the 2003 blackout. But now this was multi-day. That started to add into some really interesting questions, because what happens with all these apartment buildings and buildings that are multistory? Again, going back to the water supply issue, there is enough hydrologic head in New York City to pump water up to about five stories. If you ever go to New York, you can see anything, any building below five stories doesn’t have a water, doesn’t have to pump the water cuz there’s enough hydrologic head to get it up that far. Anything higher than that, the great innovation was something called the electric pump. You could pump it up to the top and you had those big water towers and you store the water.

Okay. If the electricity isn’t there, there is enough storage in that tank for a day or so. Right? What happens after that time? Suddenly this started to cascade into this huge crisis, because all these, anyone in an apartment building was without water in about 24 hours. People were filling bathtubs, trying to do anything. Then you have the compounding problem; of course, there’s no water in your apartment if you’re on the 17th floor. That’s a problem. Then it starts getting into the issue of you don’t have drinking water, maybe there’s stuff in your refrigerator, etcetera, etcetera. But then issues of toilets, bathing, the issues go on.

Then of course you get into specific populations: the elderly, the infirm. These are folks, and again, there wasn’t a system to identify all these folks connected throughout the system. You have all these highlighted vulnerabilities. This was the cascade of issues that emerged. People, literally going back to the 1810s, with buckets of water in the streets of New York, bringing it up 10, 20 stories to their grandmother, or whatever, sitting in an apartment.

The other thing is that in lower Manhattan, a lot of folks, a lot of the corporate folks, have started to bulkhead previous to Sandy their buildings. But a lot of other buildings had not. A lot of the buildings still today, 80 plus days or whatever it is, from Sandy, are without power, because their facilities in the basement were so compromised. This is tens of thousands of people still without electricity, and the buildings are basically hollow shells. There’s no heat, there’s no water. Not much to do.

Okay. I’m going to hop over this. This is some stuff that, coming out of Sandy, thinking about how all these cascades play out. Let me just, in deference to time, come back to that if you like, look at this policy issue. There’s been a lot of reports that have come out recently about climate change and New York City and very sort of rich reservoir of material. There’s been a lot of work already trying to embed some of these efforts into New York City planning efforts, both in terms of even creating raised subway air vents. Other efforts at shoring up the water supply system, again, both storm surge for some of the waste water treatment plants as well as protecting against potential droughts.

There’s been a lot of action that’s taken place. Even last year, the city re-authorized its climate, its resilience plan, or a plan NYC, focused on the issue of resilience. They named a whole set of different activities that could be done, and even in Irene they started to experiment with these large, inflatable barriers against storm surge into subways and other kinds of things.

In some of the work that I’ve done looking at this literature, you can start to highlight, coursing back over the decades, there’s been a lot of efforts, and there have been some significant policy shifts. One of the more interesting ones, I’ll just highlight for a moment, is there’s been a very conscious effort shifting from the concept of adaptation to the issue of resilience.

All right? In another area we’ve been writing up it’s looking at how policy shifts take place. What are some of the normal drivers of that? This is a very simplistic diagram, but there’s a whole bunch of other things that start to be, start to emerge with respect to climate policy shifts in New York City. Emerging scientific knowledge, extreme weather events, potential for catastrophic impacts, global local networks and opportunities to revisit existing policies. These are things that have accentuated, this is pre-Sandy, accentuated the movement for policy development.

What I’ll say, looking at this particular frame, and I’m not going to jump through all the various pieces, but there’s a—this thing’s a little messy here—policy space for Hurricane Sandy response. There’s a lot of opportunity in there. We’ve had a stress and a crisis in the system, and the question is, what kinds of resilience opportunities are we going to build up or enhance? Just looking at this diagram, and again, I’m sorry about the shortness in review here, but it’s in this policy space that I feel we are conceptually.

There’s been a lot of discussion in New York about this idea of legacy, and lots of other, be looking at other places, and certainly the San Francisco Earthquake. New York always things big. What’s the legacy of that earthquake event, and some of the big infrastructure pieces that went in? Cuz one of the big things in New York is this idea of we need to create a huge barrier against future storm surge. There’s lots of other cities have also embraced large-scale infrastructure pieces, particularly San Francisco, with the building of the Hetch Hetchy reservoir to provide water supply for, to put out future fires.

Okay. Some things, some comments on where we are so far with respect to recovery. The rebuilding efforts in general are somewhat piecemeal and relatively small. The big money is still being sought. Congress authorized some cash, but the governors of the two states, New Jersey and New York, still want a lot. They’re all bringing their experts to bear on the issue. There’s a lot of Katrina folks coming in, as example. There’s an interesting focus on keeping, and this make sense, psychologically, economically, keep people in place and getting businesses back up as quickly as possible.

Right now, the most impacted area the heavily, are very highly geographically concentrated. There’s also this early narrative of what works and what hasn’t. There’s a lot of interesting discussion here, for example, sand dunes. This is relevant directly to the kinds of ways that you guys are thinking. The idea that on the Jersey shore, the places that had sand dunes seemed to have less damage than places that did not. But then, how do you—that’s early evidence, how do we take this further? These narratives. There’s still, all the options are on the table.

One of the general frameworks is the recognition to move forward we have to develop a set of flexible adaptation pathways that can respond to future science and future understanding of the science while trying to keep us, the city, within this level of we might define as acceptable risk. If we don’t do anything, we can exceed that level fairly significantly, but if we do a flexible approach, we can do small, incremental activities to provide enhanced resilience and adaptation.

Okay. What are some of the things that are going on, really, like, as I was reflecting over the last day or so, coming out here. New Jersey, State of New Jersey, Governor Christie. You’ve seen him on TV, right? They’re all about rebuilding the Jersey shore as soon as possible. They have to make the summer season—believe it or not, tourism is huge in New Jersey. Leading industry, and the bulk of it is the Jersey shore. They are whole-hog, the state is already loosened up permitting processes to get, allow municipalities to rebuild existing infrastructure, or rebuild infrastructure the way it was.

In terms of this transition question, I don’t wanna, you can maybe quote me, I don’t know, but the window is closing pretty rapidly on New Jersey. They’re focused on rebuilding ASAP. The governor of New York has seated all these various committees with recommendations to how to make New York more resilient to climate change. He’s brought forward a huge agenda; there’s no money to pay for it.

The city of New York is developing a full-scale climate resilience plan. That’s the thing I mentioned. They’re really focused on this issue of storm surge, sea level, as well as heat waves. They recognize that there are other risks that the city faces. Particularly the high-risk communities and neighborhoods. I just want to give you a little illustration of some of these things—I know I’m two more minutes or so? Okay. What’s being proposed, and what are some of the issues? Literally, everything is on the table. Again, think about this in the context of whether or not this will emerge as a transition or not.

First of all, there are these large scale, there’s been a lot of discussion about a large-scale hard infrastructure. The storm surge barrier. The Netherlands has one. Stamford, Connecticut has one. Providence, Rhode Island has one. New York wants one. The mayor of New York, a couple of weeks ago, said, “We’re not doing that.” But his term is ending. The heir apparent, the city council president, Christine Quinn, potential new mayor, has been much more supportive of the notion. There are U.S. Army Corps, large-scale engineering assessments now being done.

There’s also a lot of discussion about small-scale hard infrastructure. Lots of little things. I mentioned there had been some grading of subways already, raising the subway grates so if there is water coming in in some of these low-lying areas, it won’t flood into the subways. Now they’re thinking about doing that another level. There’s a colleague of mine phrased it as the Taipei Solution. If you’ve ever been to Taipei, you step up, you get a lot of rain, not flooding, but huge rain events. You can step up, and then you step down into the subway. The idea, reason why you step up is that there’s a little bit of a barrier, a lip. If you have three or four, five inches of water in the street, it’s not going to be flooding into the subway.

There’s a whole set of discussions about large-scale soft infrastructure, quote unquote, or ecosystem services. There’s a really tremendous work about creating these large lagoon areas within the harbor and the extended coastal zone, which could be baffles and absorb some of the shock of storm surge or other large forward movements of water. Or extending large existing wetland areas. There’s also a lot of small-scale soft infrastructure. Restore wetlands, beach dunes.

One of the interesting take-home messages for this, and it’s very profound and very simple, that the areas where there were extant wetlands—and again, remember, most of the wetlands in this region, they were very extensive, most of them have been lost—but the ones, the places they were still present, the land area further to the shore were not impacted by the storm surge. Not nearly as much. Conversely, those places that had been wetlands were the most devastated by the storm. Those are the places that were flooded. Okay?

In fact, it’s in those communities, like the Breezy Point and the Rockaways and Staten Island people are thinking maybe we can restore the old wetlands. Maybe we won’t rebuild these houses, we’ll restore wetlands there. As well as the dunes. There’s a lot of discussion about dunes. Then of course there’s the large-scale policy issues. A retreat from the shore as an opportunity. That’s on the table. These are just some of the examples of some of the large-scale stuff that’s been proposed. I’ll go back to that. There are various strategies, go in to this last slide which should have illustrates different examples. You can see some of the dollar values. The argument is—this is in billions, like 21 billion—that the impact is insignificant in comparison, this cost is insignificant to the impacts.

Let me just end off with this notion of is there a transition occurring? Where is Sandy and its impacts going to fit within the urban systems, the urban environmental systems of New York? It’s an interesting question. There is dramatic change within some sectors, like the telecommunications are dramatically rebuilding their infrastructure. Better, faster, stronger, according—so it’s a whole new way of doing things, particularly in lower Manhattan. But in other contexts in other situations, that’s not the case. It’s really this nested sense that there are in some cases transitions, in isolated sectors or industries, or maybe in particular buildings, but the larger scale, the region scale or municipal scale, that’s really not present as of yet. Going back to that statement that I made, things sometimes get worse before they get better. I think we’ll make some forward movement with Sandy, but it’s still, it’s very much up in the air as to whether or not we’ll actually move forward in some of these larger scale ways.

With that, I just want to say thank you. Sorry for going on a few minutes, a little bit long. It was a colleague of mine that took this photo. It very poignant to me, Staten Island devastated, former wetland. The question is a very simple ending point, is there a transition with respect to this property? Is there a future, should it be a wetland again? That question is still yet to be determined.

Thanks.