The new year has kicked off with weather events that have many on alert across the country: Santa Ana winds reaching 100 miles per hour spread destructive wildfires across Los Angeles; in the same week, cooler winds broke away from the arctic for the second time this winter and dropped temperatures to freezing lows across a large swath of the country.
It’s expected that these extreme events will occur more often and be experienced for a longer span of time, so more cities are working on plans to adapt to survive it.
To do this, New York City relies in part on a volunteer group of local and regional scientists and engineers, who search the risks that New York faces and share guidance that helps city agencies pursue plans to adapt the city for climate change effects.
The NPCC’s goal “is to give us the data we need to solve the problems,” said Paul Lozito, deputy executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (MOCEJ). “What it does for most New Yorkers is it validates the experiences that they’re having, because we do need that sort of quantitative and qualitative data that’s vetted by academics to make good public policy.”
The scientists have produced a report about New York City’s biggest and emerging issues, from flooding and extreme heat to energy needs and equity and justice for vulnerable communities. It covers a lot of ground, but looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, these are a few of their takeaways on the deadliest and costliest issues: heat and flooding.
Events like the extreme heat waves, floods, and storms of years past are proving to be expensive and life-threatening: 24 people have died in the LA fires to date and the damages are projected to be the most costly in U.S. history; the recovery from last year’s Hurricane Helene could cost more than $200 billion; in New York, the heat is killing hundreds in the city every year, and nearly a million homes in the tri-state are at high risk of flooding.
Understanding flooding and its downstream effects
In New York, it’s not just hurricanes that are a threat, but heavy rainfall, or pluvial flooding, that affect a larger part of the city and has to be considered in citywide strategies to manage stormwater, the scientists found.
“We’d seen that, but not in a really deadly way,” Matte said of rainfall from storms prior to Hurricanes Sandy and Ida. “I think highlighting the threat of pluvial flooding … that’s really important, and clearly was a kind of a blind spot the city had.”
Matte explained that the city was very focused, for regulatory reasons, on reducing what are called combined sewer overflows, when sewage treatment plants or wastewater treatment sites get overwhelmed and untreated sewage goes into surface water. “But the threat to life and limb from pluvial flooding had not gotten the same amount of attention,” he added, “and tragically, it took more than a dozen deaths for that to happen.”
Some recommendations from scientists include developing hazard maps that illustrate the current and future flood concerns New York City faces, and that the city continue its efforts to create simulations of how coastal, sewer, and groundwater flows. They recommend assessing the compounded flood risks in New York with more of these flood models.
Timon McPhearson, a professor of urban ecology at the New School, said that people must both adapt to living with the water and invest in managing its flow. A combined strategy of controlling water movement and adapting housing and public infrastructure to direct water safely through the city is essential, but will require significant long-term investments, including nature-based solutions like green roofs and rain gardens and creating more water-absorbent surfaces in the concrete jungle to soak up some of the flood water.
“Decreasing vulnerability and risk requires multiple types of solutions to be put into place and to be coordinated,” McPhearson said. “That coordination is a huge challenge, but is absolutely required.”
The report emphasized that the long-term health impacts of flooding, like mold exposure, need to be better understood, McPhearson said. Directly linking specific health impacts to flooding events may mean that agencies must consider these needs in the services that they provide. Understanding these health implications is crucial, since these health issues fall hardest on low-income, BIPOC, and immigrant communities.
New Yorkers need more protection from extreme heat
When it comes to climate, heat is more deadly than hurricanes, tornados, and flooding combined, the scientists said. To address the impact of heat on residents, the city’s scientists recommended monitoring indoor temperatures, improving warning systems that alert people about how to navigate the heat, and map New York’s hottest, most high-risk areas.
“New Yorkers have to prepare for warmer summers,” said Deborah Balk, NPCC co-chair and professor of public affairs at Baruch College.
Heat-related deaths had been decreasing since the 1970s with more widespread access to air-conditioning, but over the last decade or so, the death count has begun rising again, said Tom Matte, a physician, environmental epidemiologist and senior lecturer at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “I’m disappointed to say that,” he told the AmNews, “despite that progress and despite the fact that for a long time, we have managed to make the case in city plans that there needs to be an increase in subsidies for cooling assistance.”
The subsidies, which help provide eligible low-income households with air conditioners for healthy temperatures haven’t really changed much, Matte said. Unlike with heating bills in the winter, New York has historically hasn’t offered public utility assistance for cooling bills in the summer.
While there’s agreement about the risk and danger of heat, Matte, who used to work for the city’s health department, said that they’ve run into challenges with getting the city to embrace recommending residents get and use air-conditioners.
“We did a lot to try to elevate that issue, and still, when we started work on the [latest NPCC report], there was some pushback,” he said. “The idea is, air conditioning is, in the jargon in the climate world, maladaptive,” because of the impact of air conditioners on warming the air.
While widespread air-conditioner use raises outdoor temperatures, Matte said that when it comes to saving lives from heat, as well as filtering out air pollutants and irritants that get worse with warmer temperatures, it’s a public health no-brainer.
Speaking from his experience in working for the city’s health department, Matte said that his team’s recommendation then was “to be more direct about telling people they need to get to an air-conditioned place, [to] use their air conditioning if they have it,” he told the Amsterdam News. “We need to do more to provide air conditioning to people who don’t have it.”
Lozito of the Mayor’s Office said New Yorkers who are eligible should seek energy assistance through the city and state via the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP or HEAP). However, the program faces a routine problem: The cooling assistance part of the program runs out of funding within weeks of opening applications.
“We’re vociferous advocates for the HEAP program,” Lozito said. “Every year, we run out of resources by July. With our advocacy this year, there were some additional state resources attributed, but because the issues with heat are compelling, they still ran out of money.”
The state currently allocates 50% of its energy assistance to warming people in the winter, compared to just 4% toward cooling people in the summer. “The need is identified in at least a baseline in July of every preceding year. How much, how many applicants were not served?” Lozito said.
Planning for a fair and just climate future
According to Balk, the NPCC was happy overall with the needs that the report tackled, taking on issues that many agencies have presented. They found more alignment than not with the city about the needs to meet.
“I think that the city’s working on so many fronts, trying to make that a reality — to make smart, informed choices, and NPCC is part of it,” she said.
The reports from the NPCC have built on previous knowledge that ultimately helps create the “climate information of record” for the city. There already are discussions of weaving in issues like climate financing into the next report.
“Each successive iteration of the NPCC report has expanded its scope to include a wider range of issues, such as public health, climate justice, and environmental racism,” said Bill Solecki, a former NPCC co-chair, current NPCC advisor, and professor of earth and environmental sciences at Hunter College.
One of those issues was how to tackle adapting New York equitably.
“We know from the science, and also from community-based knowledge, that climate impacts don’t affect everyone equally, and that there are certain areas of the city and also certain populations that are more vulnerable than others,” said Sheila Foster, professor of climate at Columbia University and a co-leader of the NPCC’s equity work since 2016.
No two parts of New York City are alike in their needs. Involving the community in climate adaptation is both important and proven successful in giving communities more than one positive change, Foster said.
“We also pointed to examples around the world, [and] around the country, some including here in New York City, of ways in which local governments and cities are working together with the most vulnerable communities to co-produce and co-create the adaptation scenarios and planning that need to be in place that help those communities transition to a more sustainable future,” she said. “Climate change and climate impacts land on an unequal landscape, so you have to take that into account — the different communities, their needs, their impacts, their vulnerability — in planning that.”
There’s a real possibility that climate policy can unintentionally harm communities that are affected by climate change, Foster said. The lens of a justice framework takes into account the intersecting vulnerabilities that people are living with, including housing insecurity, energy insecurity and gentrification. “We cannot do climate planning without that lens,” she said.
Foster said the scientists have recommended that the city quantify these risks as a way to guard against taking actions that inadvertently hurt vulnerable communities.
“Our climate has already changed … we’re no longer in the same kind of conditions and atmosphere that we are used to,” said MOCEJ Executive Director Elijah Hutchinson in October. “It’s hotter and it’s wetter, and with these changes in temperatures, it’s essentially like having an extra month of summer.”
Hutchinson said that by 2027, the city is going to use the data from the NPCC and “integrate it into all city capital planning and all design projects so that we’re designing for the future with heat and extreme weather on all of our publicly funded infrastructure and large-scale projects.”
Action about the climate requires work across many agencies — the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), Housing and Preservation Development (HPD), and Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), just to name a few. Lozito said one of the goals his office plans to pursue in 2025 is to establish a maximum indoor air temperature requirement for new construction.
“That’s our sort of floor mandate that we’re working toward, and that’s informed in part by data that we collected from NPCC that shows that the city is getting hotter,” he said.
The mayor’s office released an environmental justice report in 2024 that Lozito said used findings from the NPCC, and envisioned 2025 as a year to begin planning for carrying out the report’s findings.
Using NPCC data, the New York City Council introduced a bill to require the city to create and update a flood risk map that highlights rainfall risk and impacts of projected sea-level rise.
If 2024 brought about a flurry of reports, legislation, and new data for the city to use, then 2025 brings a year of planning and execution. In some ways, New York is heading in that direction: The state has created an extreme heat action plan, started planting more trees to help cool neighborhoods that were historically excluded from getting trees planted in decades past, and passed a bill to install solar panels on public buildings.
Soon enough, more data to fuel more responses will come, since in November, Mayor Eric Adams announced the next council of scientists. Matte said he’s ready to pass the baton to more scientists who are digging into how New York City needs to adapt and bring New Yorkers’ needs forward.
“We need to lean into making it possible to live in New York with the climate we have,” Matte said. “It’s just like other health and safety issues: The city’s first responsibility is the people that live here and work here and go to school here, to keep them safe, give them opportunity — economic opportunity … I think focusing on that, as the NPCC has done, is really important.”
The work of the city’s scientists lives online at climateassessment.nyc. The next set of volunteer scientists has already been assembled to produce the city’s fifth report, and they’re already looking at finding ways to make the next report more usable by the public.
“One of the things we’ll be taking on NPCC5 is some guidance on how to use this information in a way that can help action, both at local, community-based organizations and for the city and the region,” said McPhearson, who will co-chair the 2025 panel.
Members of this NPCC shared both optimism and concern about where New York goes next as it plans for a future still full of unknowns. Is New York City’s climate vision bold enough for the future? “It’s trying to be,” Foster said.