Future climate resilience and adaptation visions of New York City

Keywords: urban resilience, climate adaptation, co-production, futures, participatory, New York City
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

Cities face increasingly complex and interrelated climate adaptation and resilience challenges. Future urban resilience to these challenges depends on diverse and transformative solutions that address the interdependencies within urban social, ecological, and technological systems (SETS). We ask: how do city actors frame concerns, visions, and pathways toward future urban resilience and sustainability? We draw on the co-produced knowledge and visions developed during participatory visioning workshops held with New York City (NYC) practitioners to envision a resilient and climate adapted city in 2100, as well as a pre-workshop survey of practitioners. The workshops included practitioners from city, state, and federal agencies, in which participants richly described six future scenarios addressing climate hazards: extreme precipitation, heat, drought, winter freeze/thaw, coastal storms, and multiple co-occurring hazards. From the co-produced scenarios, we synthesized transformative governance models, scenario goals, and transition pathways to achieve the future goals and strategies and made qualitative and quantitative comparisons of potential outcomes, synergies, and unintended consequences. For example, all scenarios focused on the reduction of city and community vulnerability to the given hazard, but varied in the social, ecological, and technological-infrastructure strategies and pathways to meet these goals. The future visions also outlined diverse and innovative climate resilience governance models that included multi-scale steering committees, to participatory decision making with communities and highly collaborative processes across sectors. The co-produced visions for the future highlight the value of participatory processes in developing the transformative capacities, governance, and diversity of SETS solutions needed to shape the future resiliency of cities.