A Look at Climate Week NYC

Written by Andrew Graham

Monday, 28 September 2009 13:05

While most eyes and ears were fixated on two global climate change meetings last week – Tuesday’s climate change summit at the United Nations and Thursday’s G-20 summit in Pittsburg – a panel last week for Climate Week NYC gave guidance on what’s happening locally to combat climate change.

NYC Cool Roofs, for example, a program that organizes volunteers to paint building roofs light colors that don’t absorb as much heat as dark ones, has painted over 100,000 square feet of rooftop in recent memory and has set a goal of greening 1 million square feet of roof in 2010. Building codes in California, Florida, and Georgia encourage commercial buildings to install white roofs by offering financial incentives.

The program is part of PlaNYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s initiative to address climate change at a city level. Aaron Koch, policy advisor at the Mayor’s office, said during the panel that lawmakers aim to release an update on that initiative by the end of the year.

Overall, localizing the global issue of climate change shows that it is a dilemma for city governments and local activists. Regional lawmakers and communities can affect real change on a local level with sensible policies and responsible behavior. But a sustainable city cannot insulate people from an unsustainable planet.

The city’s second-largest landowner, the New York City Housing Authority, wants to upgrade the efficiency profiles of its buildings by replacing old, inefficient technology with new, efficient components. It recently installed compact fluorescent light bulbs in some of its buildings and is seeking funding to upgrade boiler and heating systems with more-efficient equipment, with such building retrofits taking two years to complete once the funding is secured, said Cristiana Fragola, an official at the NYCHA.

“So many things we’re doing have duel benefits,” said Koch about climate-change policy’s concurrent need to both mitigate carbon emission and adapt to the upcoming climate changes most scientists say are inevitable.

Climate change is poised to hit poorer countries harder. Underdeveloped countries want to take cues from New York and other cities taking action against climate change, said Bo Lim, special climate change adviser at the United Nations Development Program. She called for more-organized information sharing between cities like New York and London and the lesser-developed areas that are already being hit hard by climate change’s harmful economic and humanitarian effects.

The demographic shift of populations into cities – the past years have seen more people living in cities than outside of them for the first time in the Earth’s history – is helping drive local climate change initiatives because, as Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig said during the panel, “the potential for urban areas to be particularly vulnerable to climate change is very real.” New York City has contingency plans for floods and other protocols for handling potential crises, she said.

Rosenzweig spoke on behalf of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute Center for Climate Systems Research.

The Mercy Corps Action Center to End World Hunger arranged the panel and currently has on display a maps exhibit displaying the impact of climate change-related storm surges on the city and a case study on Niger that shows climate change is one of the underlying causes of global hunger.