Urban adaptation and resilience planning for a changing climate: a study of New York City
Creators: name: Nguyen, Khai Hoan
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: Over the last three decades, cities and urban areas have functioned as arenas and laboratories for climate action. Considering the projected climate variability for the 21st century along with the impacts of extreme weather and climate events, adaptation to reduce climate-related risk remains an imperative and unavoidable urban issue in the coming years. Local governments have increased efforts to institutionalize climate change adaptation into urban policy and planning, yet there are knowledge gaps regarding the types of strategies and governance structures that are best for coordinating and implementing climate actions at the local level. In particular, there is a need to understand how these strategies and structures evolve over time to reflect emerging issues, shifting political priorities, and innovation in policy approaches in addition to how cities overcome institutional challenges and barriers to adaptation. Further, as climate-resilient and green infrastructure investments increasingly raise equity concerns, more research is needed to examine the distributive outcomes of ongoing and proposed adaptation interventions, particularly in historically disinvested and marginalized neighborhoods. This dissertation examines climate change adaptation and resilience planning in New York City, focusing on key strategies and policy tools for urban planning, industrial land use and sectors, and communities. The research is informed by a year of on-the-ground fieldwork and data collection through participation in citywide and community meetings and semi-structured interviews with local stakeholders engaged in climate adaptation planning. It also employed policy content analysis of key city-level planning documents on climate change response and ArcGIS visualization of land use and flood risks. The research is presented as three separate but interrelated studies. The first study is an investigation of the evolution of key strategies and policy tools (2002-2022) for climate adaptation planning in New York City. The second is an assessment of urban industrial programmatic initiatives related to climate adaptation, mitigation, and sustainability, exploring the role of industrial sectors and industrial land use in efforts to build urban resilience. The third is a comparison of community participation in two climate resiliency-projects in Sunset Park, Brooklyn that investigates the relationship between land use, economic development, and climate resilience planning and identifies effective grassroots tactics and strategies for enhancing community influence over urban planning outcomes. Adaptation planning is a complex and challenging task that involves top-down and bottom-up coordination between a variety of stakeholders from municipal agencies, civil society, and the private sector. Research findings indicate that New York City continues to be on the forefront of climate adaptation efforts, and the development of climate adaptation planning and implementation of adaptation projects are achieved through innovation and experimentation. One key finding suggests that actionable climate science is critical to policy- and decision-making on urban planning and sectoral planning, by enabling to the city government to determine adaptation needs, identify funding sources, and develop climate resilience design guidelines and regulatory reforms on land use, building codes, and insurance. Another finding shows that urban industrial sectors and core industrial zones are essential to contemporary efforts on clean energy transition, sustainability, and social equity and environmental justice, but recognition and understanding of these connections are in early stages. The last finding reveals that factors such as an extensive legacy of community-led planning, the presence of proactive community champions, and grassroots mobilizations are critical for strengthening local influence over urban resilience planning processes and empowering community voices to produce more equitable outcomes. This research addresses the need for more context-specific case studies on urban adaptation as well as offering policy strategies and planning tools for municipalities striving to balance land use, climate resilience, and social equity goals.