Equity Work Group Co-Chairs: Sheila Foster and Ana Baptista
New York City’s (NYC) current climate justice challenges can be linked to the region’s history of colonization, land dispossession, and slavery, which have shaped past and current land-use patterns and decisions, climate risks, and social vulnerability.
This NPCC4 chapter provides an overview of NYC’s efforts to address climate equity, building on the findings and recommendations from NPCC3. It assesses the City’s efforts to integrate equity into climate adaptation since 2019 and highlights how NYC communities have implemented innovative approaches to address intersecting and ongoing climate and social stressors.
The chapter also provides a framework describing the interconnections and relationships between historical and present land-uses, climate risk, and social vulnerability. While each of these components have been individually studied, there have been fewer studies that examine the relationship of past land use practices to social vulnerability, which leads to specific climate vulnerabilities, leading to future land use patterns with their own inequities.
Highlighting these complex relationships will help the City identify underlying mechanisms that, if not addressed through policy, can lead to more climate inequities.
This chapter also expands the effort from NPCC3 to define metrics that can be used to assess the ongoing vulnerabilities of local populations to climate change. Like NPCC3’s focus on social vulnerability analysis and mapping, NPCC4 describes a novel metric combining social vulnerability and climate displacement into a single score: a Climate Displacement and Socio-Vulnerability (CDSV) score. This metric will identify areas of the city most vulnerable to climate hazards, socio-economic disparities, and displacement. The recommended scoring method is calculated at the neighborhood level to highlight the vulnerabilities of certain populations with intersecting climate risks.
The chapter concludes with an overview of best practices drawn from local, national, and international contexts that prioritize community-driven, climate resilience approaches that are more integrated, equitable, and racially just.
Photo Credit: Manhattan From Williamsburg Bridge” by edenpictures is licensed under CC BY 2.0.