Urban Climate Resilience

Converging Social, Ecological, and Technological Infrastructure Systems for Urban Resilience

The USL is working with partners at Arizona State University on a National Science Foundation Convergence Research grant. Initiated in 2016, the NSF’s Convergence program aims to address “vexing research problems, in particular, complex problems focusing on societal needs...forming novel frameworks to catalyze scientific discovery and innovation.” This 5 year initiative will accelerate advances in a convergent urban systems science capable of providing cities with the knowledge and methods for building integrated SETS resilience strategies to extreme events, supported by cutting-edge modeling, simulation, and visualization of infrastructure systems. The project will develop and refine an urban resilience conceptual framework to guide this emerging, convergent urban systems science for cities to test and deploy. Participating cities include San Juan (PR), Atlanta, New York, and Phoenix. http://convergence.urexsrn.net/

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number (1934933). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx)

USL is co-leading the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN), a five-year collaborative, multi-institutional, transdisciplinary research network (2015-2020) funded through a $12 million grant from the National Science Foundation. 

UREx focuses on integrating social, ecological, and technical systems to devise, analyze, and support urban infrastructure decisions in the face of climatic uncertainty. The interdisciplinary UREx team includes scientists, students, planners, NGOs, industry, and other stakeholders working ten US and Latin American cities including Baltimore, Hermosillo and Mexico City, Mexico, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Syracuse, and Valdivia, Chile. Core initiatives of UREx include co-designing approaches to visioning positive urban futures, assessing heat and flood risk, and analyzing nature-based solutions and other strategies for building social, ecological, and technological infrastructure resilience in cities. 

Through this work we are currently supporting the capacity and development of municipal planning in New York (Harlem Climate Resilience), Phoenix (City of Phoenix Sustainability Plan), and Valdivia, Chile (Activa Valdivia Sustainability Plan), as well as rebuilding efforts in San Juan, Puerto Rico, after Hurricane María. UREx scientists have led eight Webinars on SETS approaches, given >400 presentations at meetings, and published 94 articles and book chapters (and 5 in review). Over 130 decision makers and community leaders have engaged in UREx participatory workshops.

USL is primarily involved in SETS scenario development and modeling resilient urban futures, green infrastructure and nature-based solutions research, heat and flood risk assessment, social vulnerability and equity dimensions of climate risk, and developing conceptual frameworks and foundation for advancing resilience research and practice.

For example, the UREx Scenarios Working Group (SWG) develops scenarios through in-depth stakeholder engagement and modeling alternative pathways for critical SETS infrastructure transitions in each city. The aim is to promote visionary thinking by city stakeholders — including policymakers, planners, scientists, engineers, and other residents — through the development of desirable and plausible scenarios that analyze potential pathways through which cities can achieve more resilient  infrastructure. UREx draws upon two key innovations in developing urban sustainability scenarios:

• Combining social science (knowledge-systems analysis) and dynamic modeling (agent-based modeling) techniques to explore and evaluate SETS scenarios

• Integrating and intentionally sequencing multiple scenario approaches — including the exploration of desirable sustainable futures, participatory modeling to support stakeholder deliberation of the plausibility of these scenarios, and an assessment of the resiliency of the envisioned SETS scenarios to extreme events

• Social network mapping of stakeholders, and their information/knowledge flows, affecting (or being affected) by city infrastructure planning and decision-making. Use an agent-based modeling (ABM) framework model to simulate future scenarios for hydrology, built infrastructure, natural habitat and biodiversity, access to resources and infrastructure, and human health and well-being. Develop desirable, plausible, and resilient scenarios through a participatory scenario development process.

The SWG has important connections to the CCWG and city teams in that they will be holding scenario workshops in each city throughout the project. In addition, training for Graduate Fellows (Education and Diversity WG) is afforded through participation in these workshops.

USL also co-leads the Computation and Visualization Working Group including the development of the USL Data Visualization Platform. As part of the UREx project, USL is producing 3D visualizations that examine the equity implications of urban vulnerability. These interactive maps of nine UREx cities integrate social, ecological, and technological data from a variety of sources. The map for New York City has played an important role in our collaboration with the Mayor's Office of Recovery & Resiliency and other city agencies in the network.

Recent accomplishments include: USL SETS framing has already begun to permeate urban system science. Further, an effective network has been built and researchers are communicating among disciplines and across institutions, cities, and cultures. The network so far has engaged over 180 researchers and 230 practitioners across 10 cities. Eleven postdoctoral fellows, 20 graduate fellows, 33 graduate associates, and 3 postdoc associates are participating, plus 33 alumni (16 emeritus grad fellows, 6 emeritus postdoc fellows, and 11 graduate associates) with 48% women and nearly 40% minority. 

For the latest updates from UREx, follow @URExSRN and check out the main UREx site at urexsrn.net hosted by project leads Arizona State University.

NYC Stormwater Resiliency

Climate change is widely considered the most significant threat to human existence, and we increasingly experience its effects through weather-related hazards such as extreme heat, storms, and flooding. Urban areas are especially vulnerable due to their geographic locations and complex, interdependent infrastructure. USL co-leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers with Brooklyn College-CUNY in a $1.8M study of urban and compound flood risks associated with current and future extreme rain events in New York City. 

The team includes scientists from five academic institutions ( Brooklyn College, CUNY, SUNY-Stony Brook, The New School, Colorado State University, and Stevens Institute) and from the private sector (Jupiter Intelligence). Together, this team is collaborating to create a scientific foundation to support New York City in allocating resources to improve stormwater resilience by examining data from New York City’s complex network of ‘grey’ and ‘green’ stormwater infrastructure to create models to assess at-risk areas for urban flooding. The group is identifying areas where the city may prioritize interventions to offset these impacts. 

Urban and compound flooding pose safety risks and can cause extensive property damage. In coastal New York City, urban flood risk is compounded when rainfall occurs with storm surge events. With the increased frequency of extreme precipitation events, and with sea level rise, coastal flooding, and land use change, the complex network of stormwater conveyance systems in the city is increasingly overwhelmed, leading to flooding and water quality degradation. Several initiatives in the city aim to improve service reliability and resiliency of stormwater systems by planning and implementing effective and viable strategies across the City. Integrated water management seeks simultaneously to address these stormwater, flooding, water quality, and local concerns.  

The overall goal of this study is to develop unique modeling and risk assessment tools to advance the City’s ability to assess present and future risk from urban flooding to stormwater systems, the built environment, and communities, and use these data to identify the most vulnerable parts of NYC as well as identify interventions to offset these risks.  To date, the team has:

• created a combined hydrologic + hydraulic model to identify priority at-risk areas;

• tested the model under multiple rainfall and storm event flooding scenarios;

• identified citywide interventions for off-setting flood-related risks; and 

• assessed feasibility of interventions in representative neighborhoods in each of the 5 NYC boroughs.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

USL Director Timon McPhearson is a Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) for Working Group II for the “cities” chapter focused on climate change impacts, risks, and adaptation in cities and human settlements. IPCC scientists are by invitation and USL supports this work through research assessment and design. See New School news article here.

Urban Climate Change Research Network

USL director Timon McPhearson served as the Coordinating Lead Author for an international team of experts for a major synthesis on ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change in cities as part of the Second Assessment Report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network. Member since 2014, this research highlights the role of nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation and resilience as part of a 2018 full assessment report on climate change in cities. Digital versions are available at: http://uccrn.org/arc3-2/

New York City Mayor’s Office Urban Heat Island Task Force

From 2016-2018 USL Director Timon McPhearson served on the NYC Mayor’s Office Urban Heat Island Task Force.  This work included providing analysis and advising on policy and planning for reducing heat and heat risk in the city.  The work culminated in the US$100 million NYC Cool Neighborhoods plan, a “comprehensive approach to keep communities safe in extreme heat.” Read more about the plan here.

Research Spotlight: Climate Resilience in Prague

USL Visiting Scholar Eliška Lorencová’s conducted research in the USL on the impacts of heat and heat waves as well as studies of local perception of the benefits of urban green infrastructure for heat mitigation in Prague.  This research linked climate modeling with crowd-sourced citizen data to develop priorities for city planning for heat risk reduction in the city. This work is ongoing with expected publication in 2020.

Research Spotlight: Landslide Resilience in Sao Paulo

USL has been conducting research into drivers of landslide risk in São Paulo (MRSP), in Brazil, using a SETS approach to make recommendations for shifting policy and practices for building landslide resilience. The Metropolitan Region of São Paulo (MRSP), in Brazil, is the fourth largest urban agglomeration in the world. MRSP exhibit characteristics of an unequal and contradictory urban development. For a non-negligible part of the population, available land is often less suitable for urbanization and environmentally protected. This is the case of the hillsides that surround MRSP. Landslides, triggered by rainfall, are a negative outcome of the occupation of these areas. In a context of climate change, with predictions for MRSP of increasing frequency of intense rainfall events, disasters caused by landslides represent a major source of risk. 

In this research we characterized interactions among family’s practices and resources, built and natural environment, as social-ecological-technological system. Using a general additive model approach, we measured the contribution of each social, technological and natural factor to an increase or decrease in the probability of occurrence of landslides. This accurate knowledge traces responsibilities, but also limits, to families and other actors in coping with and adapting to climate change. 

To overcome differences in the spatial representation of physical characteristics, occupation patterns and socioeconomic data, the proposed methodology is based on converting variables to cellular space (or grid), defined as a regular lattice of two dimensions. Socioeconomic grids were obtained with a dasymetric distribution approach, using land cover maps derived from medium-resolution in different years. A two-resolution approach is used to perform data analysis, taking advantage of the best resolution for data integration and the coarse resolution for data visualization in Metropolitan scale.

Resilience, Sustainability, and Transformation: Research and Policy

We have entered the urban century and addressing a broad suite of sustainability challenges in urban areas is increasingly key for our chances to transform the entire planet towards sustainability. For example, cities are responsible for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions and, at the same time, 90% of urban areas are situated on coastlines, making the majority of the world’s population increasingly vulnerable to climate change. While urbanization accelerates, meeting the challenges will require unprecedented transformative solutions for sustainability with a careful consideration of resilience in their implementation. 

Global and local policy processes often use vague or narrow definitions of the concepts of ‘urban sustainability’ and ‘urban resilience’, leading to deep confusion, particularly in instances when the two are used interchangeably. Confusion and vagueness slow down needed transformation processes, since resilience can be undesirable and many sustainability goals contrast, or even challenge efforts to improve resilience. Here, we propose a new framework that resolves current contradictions and tensions; a framework that we believe will significantly help urban policy and implementation processes in addressing new challenges and contributing to global sustainability in the urban century. USL has been collaborating with researchers from the Stockholm Resilience Center and others to advance resilience theory and conceptual development of the urban resilience field.