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Welcome to the quarterly newsletter of the New York Climate Change Science Clearinghouse!

SPOTLIGHT: Equity and Climate Justice

Decisions about responding to climate change cannot be based on science and economics alone. They need to incorporate considerations of humans’ relationships and responsibilities to each other. Climate justice centers our responses around people, recognizing that climate change disproportionately affects socioeconomically vulnerable groups of people who often are the least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and have carried the heaviest societal burden of environmental hazards.

The Clearinghouse contains a variety of resources to help develop and implement climate solutions that are just; see examples below.

Map layers on the Clearinghouse’s Interactive Map and GIS Viewer

You can explore layers such as the CDC Social Vulnerability Index and Potential Environmental Justice Areas in New York State.

Environmental Justice Mapping Tools for New York State Communities
New York Sea Grant, 2020

A guide to 22 free, publicly available online mapping tools that can be used by communities, educators, students, and environmental practitioners to help investigate and build context around race, class, and the environment. The guide can help connect communities with data for exploring environmental justice locally. For each mapping tool, the guide gives information about the source and type of content, an overview, tips for use, and a question to explore.

Social Equity & Local Climate Action Planning

Climate Smart Communities, 2017

In this webinar, participants learn about approaches that apply an equity lens to strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. Speakers also discuss some of the resources and support available in New York State to advance equity and environmental justice at the community level.

Webinar archive here.

New York State Climate Law Tracker

Sabin Center for Climate Change Law

The New York State Climate Law Tracker monitors New York's progress in implementing its path-breaking Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, Environmental Justice Law, Community Risk and Resiliency Act, and Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act.

Northern Manhattan Climate Action Plan Climate Maps
WE ACT for Environmental Justice

Maps of several neighborhoods in New York City, showing features relevant to climate adaptation such as hurricane evacuation zones and centers, flood hazard lines, public spaces and facilities, emergency response facilities, child and senior care centers, public transportation routes, and more.

Climate Map of Washington Heights
Climate Map of East Harlem
Climate Map of West Harlem
Climate Map of Central Harlem

Solar for All
NYSERDA

A community solar program for low-income homeowners and renters in New York State. Solar for All offers eligible households the opportunity to subscribe to community solar at no cost. Program participants receive monthly credits on their electricity bills and there are no upfront costs, fees, or payments to participate.

Climate Safe Neighborhoods

Groundwork Hudson Valley

A story map to help users explore the relationship between historical race-based housing segregation and the current and predicted impacts of climate change. The story map combines an analysis of historic redlining maps and modern satellite imagery, revealing a relationship between federal housing segregation of the past century and vulnerability to extreme heat and flooding in Yonkers today.

Equitable Adaptation Legal & Policy Toolkit

Georgetown Climate Center

The toolkit is intended to aid local governments and community-based organizations nationwide that are centering equity in their adaptation initiatives. In comparing promising practices and case studies across cities, the toolkit draws lessons from different approaches and provides frameworks to help practitioners craft similar legal and policy options for their own jurisdictions in ways that will help them advance equitable responses to the impacts of climate change.

Climate Change and Social Vulnerability in the United States: A Focus on Six Impacts
U.S. EPA, 2021

A report that contributes to a better understanding of the degree to which four socially vulnerable populations—defined based on income, educational attainment, race and ethnicity, and age—may be more exposed to the highest impacts of climate change in six categories: Air Quality and Health; Extreme Temperature and Health; Extreme Temperature and Labor; Coastal Flooding and Traffic; Coastal Flooding and Property; and Inland Flooding and Property.

Coastal Risk Screening Tool: Affordable Housing

Climate Central, 2020

This tool allows users to explore what affordable housing in the U.S. could be threatened by sea level rise and coastal flooding in the coming decades, under multiple pollution scenarios. The map allows users to examine affordable housing at risk by state, city, county, congressional district, state legislative district, or zip code.

Equity Guide for Green Stormwater Infrastructure Practitioners

The Green Infrastructure Leadership Exchange, 2022

A guide to advancing and measuring equity within public sector stormwater management organizations’ green stormwater infrastructure policies, programs, and projects. The guide offers an action and evaluation roadmap that defines: 1) the industry’s shared long-term equity goals, 2) best practices that will move the needle, and 3) sample metrics that help track progress toward those goals over time. It also offers a variety of tools to support practitioners in customizing community-informed Equity Work Plans and Evaluation Plans to local contexts.

Factors Associated with the Climate Change Vulnerability and the Adaptive Capacity of People with Disability: A Systematic Review

Cadeyrn J. Gaskin, Davina Taylor, Susan Kinnear, Julie Mann, Wendy Hillman, and Monica Moran, in Weather, Climate, and Society 9, 801-814 (2017).

An open-access, systematic review that identifies factors associated with climate change vulnerability and adaptive capacity of people with disability.

NEW TO THE CLEARINGHOUSE:
Highlights of recently added resources

MyCoast: New York
New York Sea Grant & New York State Water Resources Institute

The MyCoast New York portal is used to collect and analyze photos of changing water levels, shorelines, and hazardous weather impacts across New York’s varied coasts and water bodies. Photos are linked to real-time environmental conditions to create reports that help stakeholders like government agencies, business owners, and residents understand our changing environment and make informed decisions.

Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation Portal (CMRA)
U.S. Global Change Research Program

A website to help communities understand the real-time climate-related hazards in their area, analyze projected long-term exposure to those hazards, and identify federal funds to support climate resilience projects for their communities.

FloodNet
City of New York (NYC), The City University of New York (CUNY), New York University (NYU)

FloodNet is a cooperative of communities, researchers, and New York City government agencies working to better understand the frequency, severity, and impacts of flooding in New York City. The data and knowledge gained can be used by local residents, researchers, city agencies, and others to advocate around and work to reduce flood risk. FloodNet brings together innovative sources of information on street flooding impacts in neighborhoods that are vulnerable to high tides, storm surge, and stormwater runoff. Users can report a flood.

Buying Time With Runnels: A Climate Adaptation Tool for Salt Marshes
Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center

Webinar: Salt marshes across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are experiencing rapid expansion of interior shallow water areas, which are "eating" marshes from the inside out. Runnels, or shallow channels created to drain impounded water, have been recently used by resource managers across the Northeast US to restore tidal hydrology and vegetation in these areas. This webinar describes the origin, dynamics, and prevalence of interior shallow water areas in coastal marshes, and how runnels attempt to slow and reverse open water conversion through hydrologic modification. It also discusses the history of runnel application as a "win-win" for mosquito management and wetland restoration, promising outcomes and lessons learned from existing projects.

Citizen science across two centuries reveals phenological change among plant species and functional groups in the Northeastern US
Kerissa Fuccillo Battle, Anna Duhon, Conrad R. Vispo, Theresa M. Crimmins, Todd N. Rosenstiel, Lilas L. Armstrong-Davies, Catherine E. de Rivera, Journal of Ecology 110, 1757–1774 (2022).

This study compares a recently discovered historical data set of plant phenology observations collected across the state of New York (1826–1872) to contemporary volunteer-contributed observations (2009–2017) to evaluate changes in plant phenology between time periods. These multi-site, multi-taxa phenology data matched with temperature data uniquely extend historical observations back in time prior to the major atmospheric effects of the Industrial Revolution.

The majority of the 36 trees, shrubs and forbs that comprised our analysable data set flowered and leafed out earlier in contemporary years than in the early to mid-19th century. This shift is associated with a warming trend in mean January-to-April temperatures, with flowering and leafing advancing on average 3 days/°C earlier. On average, plants flowered 10.5 days earlier and leafed out 19 days earlier in the contemporary period. Urban areas exhibit more advanced phenology than their rural counterparts overall, and insect-pollinated trees show more advanced phenology than wind-pollinated trees and seasonality and growth form explain significant variation in flowering phenology. The greatest rates of temperature sensitivity and change between time periods for flowering are seen in early-season species, particularly trees. Changes in the timing of leaf out are the most advanced for trees and shrubs in urban areas.

Did You Know?

The Cornell Climate Stewards Program is training NY residents to be Community Climate Stewards.

The program provides cutting-edge, research-based training for volunteers who support their community’s Climate Smart Communities commitments by planning and implementing climate change education, mitigation, and adaptation projects planned and implemented at the local level.

Learn more here.

Environmental Justice Mapping Tools for New York State Communities New York Sea Grant, 2020