Adapt or reap the whirlwind of the rising seas: Protect Battery Park City from the encroaching Hudson River – New York Daily News

Conventional wisdom holds that cities will always endure. Empires eventually collapse. Nations change their borders, their direction and even their identity. But cities have endured for clear geographic and socio-economic reasons.

But climate change threatens to fundamentally challenge this time-honored narrative.

Will the cities of the American southwest survive without water? What will become of Miami after sea levels rise and storm surges worsen? These are fundamental questions. New York City has its own existential threat, with its own essential questions: How will we respond, and are we too late?

The climate change alarm was sounded more than 50 years ago, when scientists showed the consequences of carbon dioxide emissions on sea-level rise. Superstorm Sandy savaged New York City nearly a decade ago, costing nearly $20 billion in damage and disruption and the death of 44 New Yorkers. But the threats associated with climate change arent behind us. Theyre barreling toward us, and the overwhelming global scientific consensus says theyll be worse than what weve seen thus far. The science is clear; we must follow it and act.

With 520 miles of coastline and entire communities at risk more often than not low-income communities its time to accelerate the transformation of our built environment. If not, New York City soon will become a wholly different kind of place.

The Battery Park City Authoritys roughly $1 billion set of resiliency projects, set to begin its first phase of construction this fall, provides an example of how to do resiliency right: providing flood protection to Battery Park City and Lower Manhattan while also offering a model for coastal communities across the globe as they confront similar challenges. These projects include key components and lessons that should be replicated as other neighborhoods pursue their own protection.

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First, the project represents the best of innovative urban flood protection design, integrating flood protection measures with elements of the impacted public spaces that community members hold so dear, like Wagner Parks iconic sightlines to the Statue of Liberty, its lawns, and its intimate gardens. In the end, the plan will provide New Yorkers with a more sustainable and newly beloved Wagner Park, with nearly 100 more trees than the park currently has. The plans also include new sustainable features like a carbon-neutral pavilion and a water reuse cistern that will help reduce park users ongoing contributions to climate change.

Strong community engagement is also key to implementing urban resiliency projects. For Battery Park Citys plans, local feedback has served as the driving force in design development. Neighborhood input informed the initial concepts of the designs, and five years of feedback at dozens of public meetings yielded meaningful changes to them. These changes havent been token; for example, neighbors and local elected officials recently led the Authority to increase the projects planned lawn space by more than 70%.

While the public engagement process to develop such projects must be thorough, it of course also must be finite. Any ambitious urban project will inevitably have its detractors, even if its just a small, vocal handful. Critically, however, Battery Park Citys project has earned local support from a broad range of community members and local elected officials, in favor of the project moving forward on schedule. This, too, should provide a valuable lesson for other urban areas working to implement similar projects.

Engagement, along with improvements to public access, resilience and ecology, are all under additional scrutiny as BPCA pursues the Waterfront Alliances Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines certification. This technical review assesses whether the design meets the alliances acclaimed gold standard, including ensuring that it meets the best available sea level rise projections. While it has only completed the first of two reviews, preliminary scores for the park are very strong.

As a neighborhood literally built into the water on landfill sourced from the excavation of the original World Trade Center site the Authority is right to take its resiliency responsibility seriously. The community must continue to embrace this vision and recognize that cities must grow and change to meet the endless challenges they face.

As a city planning term, preservation is often understood solely as the practice of keeping our built environment the way it is, and resisting any change. Climate change upends that approach. Instead, we must change our cities in order to preserve them. Doing so thoughtfully will chart a path forward not only for New York City, but for other vulnerable cities around the world striving to endure, as they have over the centuries.

Ward is chair of the Waterfront Alliance and previously served as the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and executive director of the Port Authority.

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Adapt or reap the whirlwind of the rising seas: Protect Battery Park City from the encroaching Hudson River - New York Daily News