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Ten years ago, Superstorm Sandy devastated our region and served as a sobering wakeup call to the risks of coastal flooding, made worse by climate change. The period that followed launched a robust time of planning for resilience at various scales. Communities were the first responders, and building on what they experienced, they then rolled up their sleeves to plan for a new normal. The result? Community-led, neighborhood scale efforts by residents, community organizers and partners to develop plans for local resilience, more specifically tied to local goals and values.

As the City government takes additional steps to make New York more resilient, and as federal and state funds for resilience come into greater focus, the opportunity for the hard work carried out by these communities to inform the City’s approach to resilience is strong.

Recognizing all the incredible work that has happened since SuperstormSandy, Regional Plan Association and Rebuild by Design, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund and many community-led organizations, have developed an interactive mapping tool to showcase the planning and visioning efforts that have occurred. This first-of-its-kind tool highlights nearly 100 community-focused plans, led by around 40 community-based organizations, environmental groups, universities, and city agencies and geographically places them in the neighborhoods that each plan covers, and enables users to populate the mapper according to different plan themes, and compare them to the climate threats they address. Plans — although all locally-focused — are separated into three types, including community-led, government-led, and academic/other plans, to reflect the different organizers of the efforts.

The map is organized by themes that include the threats of coastal flooding, urban heat, and stormwater, as well as emergency preparedness, but also covered solutions such as green infrastructure, rethinking streets, and ecology restoration. Non climate themes of education and health are also included.

Initially released in BETA form in October 2022, the mapper was featured in a Climate Week Panel, was shared with community groups and stakeholders, and was part of an interactive feedback session at the Columbia Climate School’s Sandy + 10 event. Feedback shared during the BETA period has been incorporated into the mapper.

If you have additions, let us know! We will continue to update this map with community-based resilience plans to inform policy and showcase the incredible work that has already made–and will continute to make–NYC more resilient to future storms.

Methodology

The creation of the NYC Climate Resilience Plan Mapper can be broken down into 4 methodological steps: plan gathering, assigning each plan spatial data, consolidating a database of plans, and visualizing all the information into an interactive map. Overall, creating the mapper involved using a mixed methods approach that combined qualitative analysis of each community climate resilience plan and quantitative methods to enumerate each plan for further spatial analysis.

Plan Gathering

The initial process of gathering community- and place-based climate resilience plans involved crowdsourcing information on community initiatives and reaching out to community and environmental justice organizations within our networks. We created a google form that allowed individuals to submit their community-based plans or highlight other plans they may know of in the city. To supplement our email outreach, we also conducted our own research on other climate resilience initiatives happening throughout the boroughs. Additionally, the Columbia Resilient Coastal Communities Project based out of the Columbia Climate School, who were building up a similar inventory of community-based climate resilience plans, generously shared their list of plans with us.

Assigning Each Plan Spatial Data

This aspect of our methodology involved carefully reading through each plan to determine the geographical areas that each plan covered. During this phase, we had to consider the fact that not every community organization made use of spatial data to create their plans, and that existing datasets that map neighborhood boundaries—such as Neighborhood Tabulation Areas—might not accurately reflect on-the-ground sentiments of neighborhood boundaries from residents.

With these considerations in mind, we used GIS to represent each community-based climate resilience plan as a point with a quarter-mile buffer, grounding each community plan within a specific area in the city without prescribing neighborhood boundaries that may be at odds with how community members might perceive their own neighborhoods.

Consolidating a Library

Before visualizing all the plan information into a map, we built a database containing each community plan with its accompanying spatial information. This database included attributes such as a brief description of each plan, the organization where the plan is housed, and the implementation status of each plan.

Other key elements of the plans we documented through this database were the climate resilience themes that each plan covered, such as coastal resilience, climate adaptation education, and ecology restoration. Documenting the types of climate threats and approaches to resilience each plan focused on was important for this project as climate resilience can mean many different things across neighborhoods in New York City.

Creating an interactive map

Using the mapping platform, Mapbox, we visualized our database of community plans into an interactive map where users can explore the spatial distribution of climate resilience plans in New York City in relation to additional climate risk layers, such as sea level rise, Hurricane Sandy surge extent, and urban heat risk.

Additional Resources

This map is not a comprehensive map of climate threats and resilience measures in New York City. The following is a list of other excellent tools developed by other organizations and agencies to map other aspects of resilience.

NYC Climate Dashboard, from the NYC Comptroller’s Office
Waterfront Justice Project Interactive Map, from the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance and Scientist Action and Advocacy Network

Data Notes and Sources

Plan Types

Resilience plans were categorized into three groups: community-led plans, where the process was led by a local community group or non-profit; government-led plans, where the process included input from community groups and members but was led by a government agency or affiliate, and academic or other plans, which includes architecture, urban design, and urban planning studio projects.

Plan Themes

The resilience plans reviewed cover different themes, depending on the combination of threats each community faces and the focus of the group leading the process. Nearly all the plans cover multiple themes.

Coastal Flooding — Plans with a focus on coastal flooding, typically from storm surge.
Stormwater — Plans that address inland stormwater flooding and combined sewer overflow (CSO) events due to heavy rainfall.
Urban Heat — Plans that address extreme heat events and urban heat island effect.
Green Infrastructure — Plans that recommend the use of green infrastructure in building resilience.
Ecology Restoration — Plans that have an ecological restoration component, such as wetlands or forest restoration or preservation.
Rethinking Streets — Plans that recommend the transformation of the public right of way to develop local resilience.
Emergency Preparedness — Plans with an emergency preparedness component.
Climate Adaptation Education — Plans that include climate adaptation education and curriculum components.
Community Health — Plans that focus on resilience through public and community health.

Additional Layers

2050 Flood Zone — This layer is from the New York Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) 2019 report, estimating the extent of a 1% probability flood event with 30 inches of sea level rise, which has a 10% probability of occurring by 2050.
Sea Level Rise — The Sea Level Rise layer was developed by RPA for the 2016 Under Water report. It shows areas at risk of inundation at Mean Higher High Water (MHHW) at 1, 3, and 6 feet above the current average MHHW.
Hurricane Sandy Surge Extent — This layer comes from FEMA’s final model of the Superstorm Sandy flooding extent at a resolution of 3 meters.
Stormwater Flooding — The New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) modeled heavy rainfall scenarios to determine where rainfall-based flooding would occur. This map uses the Extreme Stormwater Flood scenario of around 3.5 inches of rainfall in one hour, an event with an estimated 1% probability each year.
Heat Vulnerability — The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) developed an index of heat vulnerability by community district, based on a combination of environmental factors like daytime surface temperature and green space, and social factors like poverty and race.
Disadvantaged Communities — The 2019 passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) mandates that 40% of benefits be directed to disadvantaged communities. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has drafted a list of census block groups that meet the interim criteria for Disadvantaged Communities status. This includes census block groups that meet the HUD 50% Area Median Income threshold and are located within DEC Potential Environmental Justice Areas, or are located within New York State Opportunity Zones.