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NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

NEW STORY MAP

Urban Flooding, Equity, and Green Infrastructure

Urban flooding is an increasing challenge that cities face nationally and globally. Flood risk is often disproportionate, with some people facing greater risks and impacts than others. As cities invest in solutions to address urban flooding, will those investments help those most in need? How can race, income and other indicators of disproportionate impacts be taken into account in urban planning in order to make flood mitigation policies and practices more equitable and just?

To address many of these questions the Urban Systems Lab developed a new story map that examines the complexity of urban flood risk and green infrastructure (GI) in Syracuse, NY. We explore the ambitious GI program that Onondaga County has successfully implemented targeting the city’s water quality problems related to the Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO) caused by its Combined Sewer System. We also discuss shortcomings of these efforts related to concerns about inclusion of flood risk reduction and need for more explicit environmental justice (EJ) considerations. By incorporating EJ dimensions more explicitly, the county and the city could further strengthen their green infrastructure initiative, providing protection from flooding to its most vulnerable communities. Based on our research, we propose a methodology that American cities could apply to both incorporate flood risk mitigation in their planning, as well as to prioritize intervening in locations that could benefit vulnerable communities.

Learn more about the USL’s Environmental Justice of Urban Flood Risk and Green Infrastructure Solutions project by clicking here.

PUBLICATIONS

• The USL's Z. Grabowski and Timon McPhearson are co-athors of a new Op-Ed in The Hill, "Invest in America's nature-based infrastructure."

• The USL’s Pablo Herreros Cantis and Timon McPhearson are co-authors of a new article, “A context-sensitive systems approach for understanding and enabling ecosystem service realization in cities” in Ecology and Society.

• The USL’s Chris Kennedy and Timon McPhearson are co-authors of a new article, “The thorny path toward greening: unintended consequences, trade-offs, and constraints in green and blue infrastructure planning, implementation, and management” in Ecology and Society.

• The USL’s COVID-19 research team are co-authors of, “Pandemic Injustice: Spatial and Social Distributions of COVID-19 in the US Epicenter” in the Journal of Extreme Events.

What We’re Reading

• Drought-Stricken Nevada Enacts Ban On 'Non-Functional' Grass (Huff Post)

• People of color are far more likely to live in extreme urban heat zones. This campaign will map the inequality. (CNN)

• A 20-Foot Sea Wall? Miami Faces the Hard Choices of Climate Change. (NY Times)

• The Inequality of American Parks (Bloomberg)

• Simulating alternative sustainable water futures

• The effects of urban development and current green infrastructure policy on future climate change resilience

• Wearable sensing techniques to understand pedestrian-level outdoor microclimate affecting heat related risk in urban parks

• Floods, Animals and Shared Urban Futures?

• Extreme Rainfall Statistics May Shift as U.S. Climate Warms

• International Perceptions of Urban Blue-Green Infrastructure: A Comparison across Four Cities

• Strategies for building and managing ‘trust’ to enable knowledge exchange at the interface of environmental science and policy

• Communicating future climate projections of precipitation change