Multi-hazard risks in New York City

Megacities are predominantly concentrated along coastlines, making them exposed to a diverse mix of natural hazards. The assessment of climatic hazard risk to cities rarely has captured the multiple interactions that occur in complex urban systems. We present an improved method for urban multi-hazard risk assessment. We then analyze the risk of New York City as a case study to apply enhanced methods for multi-hazard risk assessment given the history of exposure to multiple types of natural hazards which overlap spatially and, in some cases, temporally in this coastal megacity. Our aim is to identify hotspots of multi-hazard risk to support the prioritization of adaptation strategies that can address multiple sources of risk to urban residents. We used socioeconomic indicators to assess vulnerabilities and risks to three climate-related hazards (i.e., heat waves, inland flooding and coastal flooding) at high spatial resolution. The analysis incorporates local experts' opinions to identify sources of multi-hazard risk and to weight indicators used in the multi-hazard risk assessment. Results demonstrate the application of multi-hazard risk assessment to a coastal megacity and show that spatial hotspots of multi-hazard risk affect similar local residential communities along the coastlines. Analyses suggest that New York City should prioritize adaptation in coastal zones and consider possible synergies and/or trade-offs to maximize impacts of adaptation and resilience interventions in the spatially overlapping areas at risk of impacts from multiple hazards.</p

Seeds of good anthropocenes: developing sustainability scenarios for Northern Europe

Scenario development helps people think about a broad variety of possible futures; however, the global environmental change community has thus far developed few positive scenarios for the future of the planet and humanity. Those that have been developed tend to focus on the role of a few common, large-scale external drivers, such as technology or environmental policy, even though pathways of positive change are often driven by surprising or bottom-up initiatives that most scenarios assume are unchanging. We describe an approach, pioneered in Southern Africa and tested here in a new context in Northern Europe, to developing scenarios using existing bottom-up transformative initiatives to examine plausible transitions towards positive, sustainable futures. By starting from existing, but marginal initiatives, as well as current trends, we were able to identify system characteristics that may play a key role in sustainability transitions (e.g., gender issues, inequity, governance, behavioral change) that are currently under-explored in global environmental scenarios. We suggest that this approach could be applied in other places to experiment further with the methodology and its potential applications, and to explore what transitions to desirables futures might be like in different places

Public Benefits of Undeveloped Lands on Urban Outskirts: Non-Market Valuation Studies and their Role in Land Use Plans

Over the past three decades, the economics profession has developed methods for estimating the public benefits of green spaces, providing an opportunity to incorporate such information into land-use planning. While federal regulations routinely require such estimates for major regulations, the extent to which they are used in local land use plans is not clear. This paper reviews the literature on public values for lands on urban outskirts, not just to survey their methods or empirical findings, but to evaluate the role they have played--or have the potential to play-- in actual land use plans. Based on interviews with authors and representatives of funding agencies and local land trusts, it appears that academic work has had a mixed reception in the policy world. Reasons for this include a lack of interest in making academic work accessible to policy makers, emphasizing revealed preference methods which are inconsistent with policy priorities related to nonuse values, and emphasis on benefit-cost analyses. Nevertheless, there are examples of success stories that illustrate how such information can play a vital role in the design of conservation policies. Working Paper 07-2

Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene

The scale, rate, and intensity of humans’ environmental impact has engendered broad discussion about how to find plausible pathways of development that hold the most promise for fostering a better future in the Anthropocene. However, the dominance of dystopian visions of irreversible environmental degradation and societal collapse, along with overly optimistic utopias and business‐as‐usual scenarios that lack insight and innovation, frustrate progress. Here, we present a novel approach to thinking about the future that builds on experiences drawn from a diversity of practices, worldviews, values, and regions that could accelerate the adoption of pathways to transformative change (change that goes beyond incremental improvements). Using an analysis of 100 initiatives, or “seeds of a good Anthropocene”, we find that emphasizing hopeful elements of existing practice offers the opportunity to: (1) understand the values and features that constitute a good Anthropocene, (2) determine the processes that lead to the emergence and growth of initiatives that fundamentally change human–environmental relationships, and (3) generate creative, bottom‐up scenarios that feature well‐articulated pathways toward a more positive future

A climate resilience research renewal agenda: learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic for urban climate resilience

Learning lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic opens an opportunity for enhanced research and action on inclusive urban resilience to climate change. Lessons and their implications are used to describe a climate resilience research renewal agenda. Three key lessons are identified. The first lesson is generic, that climate change risk coexists and interacts with other risks through overlapping social processes, conditions and decision-making contexts. Two further lessons are urban specific: that networks of connectivity bring risk as well as resilience and that overcrowding is a key indicator of the multiple determinants of vulnerability to both COVID-19 and climate change impacts. From these lessons three research priorities arise: dynamic and compounding vulnerability, systemic risk and risk root cause analysis. These connected agendas identify affordable and healthy housing, social cohesion, minority and local leadership and multiscale governance as entry points for targeted research that can break cycles of multiple risk creation and so build back better for climate change as well as COVID-19 in recovery and renewal

The uptake of the ecosystem services concept in planning discourses of European and American cities

Ecosystem services (ES) are gaining increasing attention as a promising concept to more actively consider and plan for the varied benefits of the urban environment. Yet, to have an impact on decision-making, the concept must spread from academia to practice. To understand how ES have been taken up in planning discourses we conducted a cross-case comparison of planning documents in Berlin, New York, Salzburg, Seattle and Stockholm. We found: (1) explicit references to the ES concept were primarily in documents from Stockholm and New York, two cities in countries that entered into ES discourses early. (2) Implicit references and thus potential linkages between the ES concept and planning discourses were found frequently among all cities, especially in Seattle. (3) The thematic scope, represented by 21 different ES, is comparably broad among the cases, while cultural services and habitat provision are most frequently emphasized. (4) High-level policies were shown to promote the adoption of the ES concept in planning. We find that the ES concept holds potential to strengthen a holistic consideration of urban nature and its benefits in planning. We also revealed potential for further development of ES approaches with regard to mitigation of environmental impacts and improving urban resilience