NEW YORK, NY - The following statement can be attributed to Robert Freudenberg, Vice President for Energy and Environment, Regional Plan Association.

All across our region today, residents are facing another climate-induced tragedy. The remnants of Hurricane Ida swept through our three states with a vengeance that we should have been better prepared for. We are also again facing the reality that our most widespread and dangerous threat is the impact of water.

What wildfires are to the western United States, water is to us. It threatens us through higher seas and through extreme precipitation events. It incapacitates us by rendering our airports unusable, disrupting our city subway service, making stations into places of high risk, and shutting down our regional rail systems entirely.

Most tragically, it takes lives in basements where families are simply trying to live in a city with an affordable housing crisis, and in a car on flooded streets where our development patterns have necessitated the use of cars, whose emissions fuel the problem we now face.

As a region and nation, we must work together to find solutions to these challenges. These events will become worse and more frequent, stressing our infrastructure to breaking points, and threatening the viability of our communities.

We must: ensure the development of affordable housing in low-risk areas; help residents to leave high-risk areas; invest in safe and reliable public transit and projects like Gateway; consider new innovations like using the public right-of-way for stormwater management at a systems-level scale, and of course ensure that we meet the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets we have established for ourselves. We must also ensure federal infrastructure investments address these needs.

The longer we put off addressing the root causes and preparing for the impacts of these tragedies, the more often we will be left to reckon with the aftermath.