Climate change will batter cities — how we adapt is up to us
Leaders in the U.S. can create more resilient, equitable cities. But it will be an uphill battle.
Tropical Storm Isaias battered through the Caribbean and the East Coast of the United States this week, killing at least nine people and leaving millions without power.
Isaias — the earliest ninth storm on record — is just the latest in an already crazy hurricane season. And as the world warms, we’re likely to see worse.
New research outlines just how bad it could get. By 2100, sea-level rise and coastal storm surges may sink 20% of global GDP, damaging $14.2 trillion in assets and exposing 116 million more people to flooding.
Fortunately, each degree of warming we prevent will lessen the impact. Unfortunately, more intense flooding will still happen in the coming decades, even if we cut emissions.
“This analysis shows the urgency of action to address sea-level rise via both climate mitigation to reduce the rise and adaptation such as better coastal defenses, as some of the rise is unavoidable,” said lead United Kingdom author Robert Nicholls, a professor at the University of East Anglia, in a statement.
This means that responsibility no longer falls solely on international policymakers making carbon commitments — it’s also on mayors, engineers, and city planners to take action and adapt their cities to the stark reality of climate change.
In the economic fallout from COVID-19, leaders in the U.S. can create more resilient, equitable cities that empower their residents. Historically, though, we’re really bad at doing that.
How we’ve built cities in the past has compounded inequalities that disproportionately hurt low-income communities and people of color. And as climate change plays out, these effects worsen.
For example, “redlining,” the historical practice of denying people of color housing or loans, exacerbates climate impacts. A study published this year found that in the U.S., land temperatures in redlined areas are 2.6 degrees Celsius warmer than in non-redlined areas.
Learning from the past to avoid future mistakes is both a tireless cliche and an inescapable truth. And when it comes to shaping cities, one book, perhaps more than any other on city planning, emphasizes this point.
Pandemic reading
Robert Caro’s 1,200-page biography on Robert Moses, The Power Broker, isn’t just a must-be-seen prop for Zoom calls (or a good time-consuming read in the middle of a pandemic) — it’s a stark example of how we’ve fucked over already vulnerable communities in the past.
Moses was New York City’s park commissioner and construction coordinator from the 1930s through the 1960s. During that run, he shaped America’s largest city, building an intricate network of parks, highways, tunnels, bridges, and “urban renewal” projects. Despite never being elected to any public office, Moses ruled with an authoritarian grip, directing hundreds of millions of dollars in public works projects and making New York what it is today.
But that grip also ignored the needs of the city’s already marginalized communities. Moses displaced close to a half million people — mostly Black, Puerto Rican, and poor. Through his highways and housing projects, he divided the city by class and race. He even designed his parks to exclude low-income communities and people of color, making these areas accessible to only those with enough money to own a car.
Fifty years later, communities are still feeling the effects of Moses’s decisions.
Sea level rise gives us plenty of opportunities to change our cities again. If we do nothing, climate change will act for us, worsening disparities that already exist. But as we adapt our cities, we also risk becoming a Robert Moses of climate change, failing our most vulnerable communities.
We’ve messed this up before. Now, we have a rare chance to change things for the future.