 think we're gonna get started. Welcome. I'm Amal Andraus. I'm the dean of the school and I'm really delighted to have a fantastic group of speakers today to think about not only think but also act on the question of cities and climate change. This conversation is part of an ongoing series of discussions we've had and continue to have at the school here on resiliency. I'm looking at climate change from various disciplines, climate change as discourse, climate change as kind of opening up new forms of engagement. And yesterday I just wanted to mention we had a fantastic and inspiring and kind of scary, slightly scary book launch with Kim Stanley Robinson and you know for those of you who don't know him, he's an amazing science fiction writer, also James O'Nan who wrote the Mars Trilogy and is very committed to the environment and kind of you know writing as a way to advocate for new ways to engage with those issues. And you know the cover is really striking because it's basically New York as Venice, New York after 50 feet of water have raised and he describes this kind of new life that takes place in 2040 of people you know quite localized trying to kind of rebuild different forms of institutions and as he said it was a kind of love letter to New York, to New York as a city, as a city whose kind of beauty and infrastructure and history allows it to kind of find a way to be reborn. But as he explains you know science fiction isn't just about projecting into the future in a kind of very very serious way and listing the imagination to kind of visualize and try to kind of understand what the future might hold but it's also always a reflection on the present and what are the ways in which we're organizing ourselves now and what can we do and how can we already start the conversation of you know climate change is here, what are we doing about it and so I'm very excited to introduce briefly Michael Kimman who I hope you all know is the architecture critic at the New York Times and certainly has set a very strong very distinctive and very important tone for that kind of column which is to really think about people think about cities and and to think about how we bring back kind of architecture urbanism planning to really engage with the important issues that cities are facing today and and he's started to really kind of write about cities and climate change and is teaching about it this semester we're really happy to have him in a seminar that brings together all of the disciplines here at the school and for those of you who know me this is one of the main projects is to kind of you know think across scales and break the silos and certainly climate change creates that renewed urgency so please join me in welcoming Michael who will kind of introduce and and moderate the conversation today thank you hi it's a pleasure to be here and thank you Amal I should say it's a pleasure to be back here I taught this morning and just across the hall and as Amal said the really wonderful thing about the classes it's for me is it's bringing together people from the Earth Institute as well as people from GSAP and and really any conversation I think about cities and about climate change has to engage people across a wide spectrum who are interested in the things that are inextricably bound up with both urban affairs and the ways in which climate affects them and those are things like social equity and economic development infrastructure as well as things like creating green spaces and fair and diverse housing and so forth and one of the interesting things I think that is I mean I take it for granted that here in this audience we know the large globalizing trends the the first urban century in human history that rapid urbanization goes hand-in-hand with the effects of climate change on rural areas and so mass migrations from rural areas to cities putting pressure on so many different cities especially in the global south and those pressures are not exactly new and I think the one of the important things about climate change is not that it it is only about islands in the South Pacific which are now being drowned by rising seas but it is something that is affecting virtually every city on the planet and this connection between climate and its its various manifestations climate change is various manifestations and urbanization and the problems of cities their economic and social problems and opportunities that connection is really critical I have begun a series for the times the second part of which actually just came out a few hours ago on the Pearl River Delta cities the first part of which was about Mexico City and I chose it because Mexico City is an inland city a mile up it's not a coastal city but it's it was for me a good way of saying even cities that are not Miami are affected by climate change in the sense that you have evidence of rising temperatures more severe storms periods of drought and that these kinds of effects can act as a tipping point the spark in the tinder really for cities where you already have existing problems social problems problems of informality and in infrastructural problems all of which are bound up together to see climate change has integrated into those these issues is is really key because the solutions to climate change the the ways we need to address it have to also take into account all of these other challenges and opportunities that they they I think climate change needs to be seen as not just a thing in the future but an absolutely present and critical issue now but also as an opportunity a way of addressing these various problems and then making clear to people that climate change is not something that exists in some faraway place and that is an isolated issue but that is an accelerator of existing problems and therefore needs to be dealt with just like all the things we see as the urgent issues in our major cities today I'm thrilled that we're talking about this the cities we are talking about today and that we have the people we do to focus on them Adam Freed is the now principal at Bloomberg Associates and was a former deputy director under Mayor Bloomberg in the office of sustainability and Adam teaches here I believe as well there you are and I can testify from his coming to my class very generously he's he's really fantastic on exactly this question of the integration of climate issues with other urban issues Jeffrey Heber is the deputy mayor and chief resilience officer in the city of New Orleans which I believe had some incident a few years ago which I'm sure they'll talk about and I'm guessing that issues of equity economic redevelopment and so forth are in separable from as well as governance and the failures of governance and preparedness Kate Orff who's the founder of escape and is an associate professor and director of urban design here is also the person who brought me to teach here then in this course and I'm with them all and I'm very grateful for that and Kate has been involved among other things with the rebuild by design projects that were following a hurricane Sandy here in New York Rodrigo Rosa is a visiting research scholar here at Columbia and a legislative consultant in the Federal Senate in Brazil and you're gonna talk about Rio a city of unbelievable fascination and complexity where climate is one of many I'm sure again integrated issues of development and and and equity and way pink movies the professor and director of urban planning program here at Columbia and and I'm very grateful to her for talking me through the China piece that I wrote and I'm sure is the absolutely ideal person to talk about this with us today so without further ado who's first up to bat great Jeffrey Hebert thanks thanks Michael thanks Dean for the for the invitation it's it's very nice to be in my second home of New York I was an undergraduate on the other end of Broadway this is my sister's alma mater and when I have the free time to get out of my office I'm an adjunct lecturer at Tulane University School of Architecture so this brings me back to a place that I enjoy and not sitting in my office today which is fantastic so I'm gonna to really get to Michael's points I'm my presentation will go through really where we started at Hurricane Katrina and how we've sort of rebuilt the city since then and sort of pivoted towards the future of the city not looking back at Hurricane Katrina exclusively but looking forward 50 to 100 years ahead at what we will face in New Orleans and how we're trying to prepare for it through many sets of interventions so as Michael mentioned there was this small event called Hurricane Katrina that hit the city in August 2005 the costliest disaster in US history 1800 people died 80% of the city of New Orleans was was basically destroyed it had lasting effects on all systems in New Orleans from infrastructure including buildings and protection all the way down to the social systems of the city and and and we knew that the city had to be rebuilt much more strong than it was in the past so as many of you know and some of you probably were involved in we went through about a decade of planning of what the city should be for the future and it had many this is documented many fits and starts but really picking up in about 2007 with the unified New Orleans plan our master plan in 2010 the update to our hazard mitigation plan right at the end of 2010 which finally took into account the semblances of what we understood about climate change and sea level rise then the state's coastal master plan which came out in 2012 which introduced the multiple lines of defense strategy starting at the coast what we call coast to curb and then coming into the city and how you deal with urban water management there then really thinking about in about 2012 thinking about all right what are the social issues whether the economic issues that we need to really address as we're trying to build a city for the future that that are part and parcel of thinking about infrastructure and the physical side so a prosperity strategy came out in 2013 which is about economic opportunity in between that we put together the great in New Orleans urban water plan which was when we started to understand how we should better prepare the city to deal with urban water management so not just pumping but how do you deal with nature based solutions to solve some of the problems that we had in the past but also looking at precipitation that we are tracking for the future and how do we begin to reshape our urban environment to deal with those conditions that we knew were coming our way our NOLA for life initiative which came right after that which was dealing with urban violence which many cities across the world that actually are also on the front lines of climate change also have violence issues and there's some political conversations about that and what's going on in Syria and other places and then and then finally in 2015 wrapping all that up through the initiative that we're part of through a hundred resilient cities and the Rockefeller Foundation really pulling all those pieces together pivoting to the future and looking at projections 50 and 100 years out around climate change but also our social systems and producing our resilient strategy which actually we released to coincide with the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and we did that intentionally so as to move away from just thinking about all right we have to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina but actually moving forward and thinking about how do we have to build a city for the future so one of the things I just wanted to talk about very briefly is is how we really made that pivot to go from the past which is for New Orleans it was all about what happened at Hurricane Katrina and the post-Kentrina condition and and we felt that the time was right to pivot from just thinking about that one incident to thinking about all the things that could happen to us in the future so we went through a strategy process with stakeholders and you'll notice that we had about 350 stakeholders involved in this and about a thousand at the end of the day because we had been through 10 years a decade of planning involving tens of thousands of people and what this was meant to do is really pull all those pieces together put it into a strategy that looked at all of the systems in a comprehensive way and then move forward as as a plan for the future and what that allowed us to do is think back to all the things that we've been able to accomplish so as I as I am here today 87% of the population is back about 90% of the city looks either as it did before Katrina or better than it did before Katrina there clearly is still a huge amount of work left to do but that the city from a post Katrina recovery perspective was doing quite well but as we pivot to the future and think about what's coming our way it was time to really understand the conditions of sea level rise and and how climate change is exacerbating conditions that were already present so the first thing is to realize that New Orleans is a coastal city people in New Orleans seem to not think about it that way but it is we have this giant thing that we call a lake here that is our northern boundary the city as you can see the developed areas here we call it a lake but is an estuary of the Gulf of Mexico so as sea level rises in the Gulf of Mexico sea level rises in Lake Pontchartrain and is a huge existential threat for the city of New Orleans in addition to this is rapidly this is land that is rapidly going away we have the highest level of relative sea level rise in the world and so what's going on here where you're already having the first traces of climate migration in the United States from these low-lying areas up to the cities that are a little bit further to the north has a huge impact on what happens to the city of New Orleans so our Delta system which is connected to both the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico and thinking about what happens outside of the city and how it impacts the city is where we sort of pivot so our resilient strategy was really divided into three categories the first was adapt to thrive and that in order for us to survive for the future we have to be a city that embraces our changing environment we have to advocate for coastal protection restoration which happens outside of the city but has a huge impact on the protection of the city we have to invest in comprehensive and innovative urban water management inside the city we have to incentivize property owners to invest in risk reduction on their own property we have to create a cultural environmental awareness at every stage of life particularly beginning with children and we have to commit to mitigating our climate impact the second piece was connect to opportunity and in order for us to be a thriving city of the future we have to be an equitable city so we have to invest in financial stability for households because one of the things that we learned after Katrina and one of the things you see around the world is the most vulnerable people of the world are the people who are most impacted by climate change and in many instances they are the ones with the least amount of resources to adapt the second is to lower barriers to workforce participation continuing to promote equitable public health outcomes continuing to build social cohesion which is from the Katrina standpoint what we saw is the communities that came back more quickly were the communities that had a great deal of social cohesion and expanding access to safe and affordable housing which is something that I think around the world cities are dealing with and the final thing is when you're in a I will say this relatively old city for US standards a city that's 300 years old some of our systems are completely outdated some of our processes are outdated and in order for us to move forward we have to be more dynamic to prepare for the future so redesigning our regional transit system promoting sustainability as a growth strategy this is a huge sort of leap for us as a oil and gas community improving the redundancy and reliability of our energy infrastructure which is like a lot of places very fragile to climate change integrating resilience driven decision-making across public agencies meaning the themes that I'm talking about in this in this condition how do we start to integrate those themes in that thinking across city government agencies so that it's not just the office of resilience and sustainability talking about this and trying to align plans but that is a part of the planning of the Department of Public Works it's a part of planning of parks and parkways it's planning that is integrated in each department so the thinking is not just coming from above from the mayor but that it is a part of the everyday thinking of each of the line departments integrating I'm sorry investing in pre-disaster planning for post-disaster recovery which I think many of us have learned around the world is is much more important than the work that happens afterwards when a disaster occurs although in the US is not something that the US government invests in which is a huge problem and then developing the preparedness of businesses in neighborhoods because what we also found after Katrina and you see this after Sandy as well is the more robust and prepared of businesses particularly markets and other things that that people rely on that impacts the ability for a neighborhood to come back more quickly if there are services in the neighborhood people can come back more quickly so climate our climate is changing without global action the number of days New Orleans experiences temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit will rapidly increase this is something that we can get into more detail about sea level rise as I discussed before because we also face coastal subsidence South Louisiana is facing the highest rate of sea level relative sea level rise in the world and this is a graphic that we use to try to explain to people what this means if you're an average height person which I don't think I'm average height but this is a little bit beyond my height what 2100 ground level is based on the projected rates of subsidence and what you see as sea level and how close we're getting to our levee system at at what happens at 2100 and where you see we are today so yes there is some likelihood of protection and we've invested very heavily in our protection system but the likelihood of future failure and I don't mean this in a structural way I mean just because of the impact of storm surge on what already happens with sea level rise the ability of that infrastructure that has already been built to maintain the level of preparedness that a city like New Orleans depends on is not what you see in the Netherlands and other places that really have a more robust approach or more robust national approach to infrastructure funding to protect assets so this is what that looks like after Hurricane Katrina the US Army Corps of Engineers invested 14 billion dollars in the hurricane risk reduction system around the city we have the largest storm surge barrier in the world this is one of the largest floodgates in the world to protect the city but as I said before this was built frankly on science that was already a little bit more conservative than it than it needed to be at the time and when we add in the issues related to what we see as as the rising seas the sea level rise projections for New Orleans and what we know we can model on tropical storms and hurricanes and the ability of storm surge to impact that it's something that makes us think about have we really prepared for the future and is there's another way that we need to adapt to live in this environment this is just a picture of the surge barrier and and I like to use this picture because one of the things that it demonstrates is after a huge disaster in the United States there's always funding and thinking about large infrastructure projects but I love to show this picture because we did build the largest storm surge barrier in the world but what we really are trying to invest in which we think has an even greater greater impact when you put the two together are the nature-based solutions which of course are eroding over time and disappearing because of sea level rise as well as the gray infrastructure solution in tandem they can work very well together but if you have one without the other the risk profile is just that much higher so as we have invested in this we're starting to think about how to better invest in this system which is which is costly but is a part of our 50 billion dollar coastal master plan to really start to rebuild the natural protection system as a part of the overall protection system of the city so as I mentioned before this is the multiple lines of defense approach you start with barrier islands you have land bridges all these are naturally occurring natural ridges foundations of highways and other things that can protect communities you have the floodgates and then you get into the urban water infrastructure where the city needs to learn how to live with the amount of precipitation that we have today the amount of precipitation that is projected for the future and our ability to adapt to an environment that we sort of placed a system over the natural system it's time it's now time to sort of let the natural system come back and be a sponge for that with which we have frankly paved over over the last 300 years when doing that we really have to think about designing projects for multiple benefits as Michael mentioned before so yes we want to reduce risk of flooding and subsidence but we also want to use many of those projects particularly in the urban area for neighborhood revitalization and economic development improved health and quality of life and environmental education workforce development so that we're we're putting all the pieces together to have a comprehensive lens to look through as we develop our projects community education and engagement is extremely important particularly in New Orleans where for the past 50 years when we really started focusing almost exclusively on hard engineering we're having to change the mindset of folks so that they understand that in order for us to live in this city in the future we can't just think about it as everything is protected by a wall we have to think about what we need to do on our own property how we need to change our environment to live more cohesively with what we're seeing happening so what that means is things are going to look different than they did in the past water will be visible whereas before water was just pushed out and we have to do that in order to remain the city that we always want to be tying it to workforce development so the jobs of producing the future city should go to those people who are underemployed and undeterrained and we are right now in our first class of a training cohort for folks who are unemployed or underemployed to enter the workforce the green economy and the water economy so that the people who need the jobs the most are the people who are building the future city we have to of course take into account our flood zones and we know that's going to get worse with what we see in precipitation and how do we then retrofit the city to deal with that so I'll leave just a few examples this is one of our largest projects that we're working on today which is a 25 acre site in a neighborhood that frankly used to be swamp until about 1930 and we're reusing that land as well as all the other public sites in that area as well as medians in streets to begin to retain water to retain that future precipitation and frankly in the past two years we've seen that future precipitation already we're already beating what the what we what we've already been told we should see in 10 years we're already seeing over the past two years then looking at our medians and how we can then absorb water in our medians so as to pull back what we already know is happening and and how we need to completely re-engineer the city to adapt from a natural systems perspective I will just quickly say that New Orleans pumps more than any other place in the United States and only second to the Netherlands in the world those pumps are our largest driver of energy consumption in the city and so by reducing the load on the pumping stations we're also reducing our carbon footprint which is a part of our overall climate strategy so all these things are sort of wrapped together and then I'll leave this my final slide is in all of this and all the things that we've we've thought about that we're projecting for the future that we've learned from Hurricane Katrina Hurricane Sandy and other things around the world yet we still must be prepared for the unexpected this is February of this year just a couple months ago where a EF3 tornado touchdown in the eastern half of New Orleans that has never happened before and so even though we are we are using projections that we are prepared for the modelers will tell you this is called a tale of something that is at the very end of modeling that could happen once or twice but it is something that is happening and you're seeing more tales particularly in the U.S. and other places in the world than we've ever seen before so even as we think about the things that climate change and sea level rise and we're preparing for those things we're having these freak weather events happen that we're not even necessarily prepared for so we should be prepared and continue to be prepared to adapt to anything is what I will say because we just don't know what's happening out there for sure so finally thanks for inviting me and I look forward to the panel discussion later hello everyone good afternoon well Michael said invited Jeffrey to bat I'm not sure if I'll be able to bat and still try to understand the rules of baseball yet but I'll try to kick some ball here soccer ball which is a and of course bringing some perspective of the reality we have in Rio and how the climate change is affecting us and what role we can play in terms of cities this actually I would start to we've been talking about why cities like cities have been gaining more and more an increasing role in the world scenario issues that used to be exclusive of nation-states as climate change as immigration the refugee situation security it's increasing becoming an issue for mayors around the world and the communities part of that is because of course the we are becoming more urban right North America Europe already are largely urban Latin America was the first developing region in the world to become urban is going to be the most urbanized in a few years and of course Asia and Africa catching up and the cities can be a place when of course we can be healthier richer more educated more equal and happier but if we don't play it well if we don't consider things for the future also can be places of violence of poverty exclusion and vulnerability and of course in the developing world you have to as Michael said understand the the situation the circumstances and of the developing level that with the stage we are and that's what I'm going to show a little bit this is an expression of the economic power of cities and they are some of the cities are more important and of course the the countries that shows in the if we this is a graphic from the economist the world the top hundred economies in the world if we can combine in this exercise with the countries companies and cities would have 34 cities among the top hundred economies if the G 20 had seriously to take into consideration of course this is a this is an exercise here it would have to bring all the table the mayor of Tokyo mayor of New York and Los Angeles and before some of the the presidents of some of the countries but and that's big that's cities are places of concentration of wealth and also of population many of the the people in the world gathering the large cities the C40 climate leadership group which the real was the chair in the past years following Mayor Bloomberg the only hundred largest in cities in the world concentrate 25% of the GDP and and 600 million of people if this would be country would be the third largest country in the world but of course the global governance design is not yet prepared to understand the relevance of mayors of local leaders and also to design policies adequate it for the urban scenario this is the city of Manaus this is a was a refugee crisis in Brazil is not an exclusive problem of the Middle East or Europe we also are facing this there's a lot of immigration from refugees and other reasons from developing countries to developing countries we have to issue 4,000 refugee visas for these hating people and of course these people come and they pressure the city the the urban systems in Brazil for example health care is free and universal you cannot deny health care for for a refugee or name on an immigrant and if Germany had received a million people of refugees in 2015 as the International Organization of Immigration says that means that Berlin actually received 10,000 refugees alone so this is we have to understand the issue in terms of how it's affecting the the functioning of cities and especially in developing world we can see by Lebanon for example which is has a 4 million people and is dealing with over a million refugees from the the Syria crisis Brazil it's doing some work on this we're among the top countries that give actually Syrian refugee visas just a little ahead the United States and the International Organization of Immigration expects that climate change as Michael said is aggravating the situation we had 21 million people displaced by disaster since 2008 which is a likelihood of 60 percent more than was for four decades ago and of course that brings aggravates also some concerns a terrorist attacking in Russia raises the concern here in New York City and gets everyone concerned by it this is a graphic that shows how the the refugee crisis is aggravating this is in Germany the number of asylum asylum applications in Germany has have gone up since the last years the same here in Brazil more than 20 times as used to be and cities and may have gradually been powered despite this is still a lack of enforcement Rio has a very long tradition on on sustainable and climate negotiations as you remember the the first United Nations conference that understood the problem as a problem for for society was in Rio 1992 we haven't had much progress in the following years in the in Kyoto and Copenhagen but of course Brazil played actually a strong role articulating the bricks which is is a is a group that is actually a very quite unique idea of a block of course they are not territorially connected and unite countries as Brazil India South Africa and Russia and China they're not necessarily very similar but and in the climate negotiations they they somewhat found a common ground and have been articulating this past years their their positions which it's a good sign how this thing is becoming global but of course we need to strengthen this what we call them multi-dimensional gel politics right it's not only about the nations mayors I have to be brought on the table Benjamin Barber many of you have heard he he defends that mayor should rule the world of course he makes an exaggeration around that but he says that because of course mayors are problem-solvers there's like we like to say there's no Republican or Democratic way to collect the trash and they understand that they have to do what it what it works and of course their response is being what the nations should work on which is cooperating right and I think the organizations as C40 should are an example how they are had have been cooperating especially nowadays with the in this new era and with the fight against populism and and demagogues of course from left to right xenophobia and and the leadership of mayors of local leaders it's very critical and and also other manifestations of that for for example the mayor of Paris is strengthening the strength the agenda of the women leadership and was recently here in Colombia when in an event talking about women leadership we have a very short deadline this recent report from C40 says basically we need to reduce the our emissions emissions per capita from five to three point under three points per capita by 2030 otherwise I'm not going to be able to to keep the the temperature rise under 1.5 degrees which will avoid the the most most drastic effects of climate change and and if all the cities over a hundred thousand people could reduce the take actions we would do a half of the work that needs to be done of course the the main work still it's with the cities from from the developed world which have a much higher rate of emissions for per capita but also this is a work that has to be done in the developing world of them as well that's why the new IPCC report has eyes will have a specifically chapter in cities to understand because they understood that the the solution has to comprehend the the functioning of the urban systems this is a favela of real favela the Rocinha 20% of the population of Rio lives in slums and also it is a problem that is in New York in Rio and it's a sign of how the the urban expansion has been chaotic in this function we need to think on climate policies also considering that kind of condition is still the solution that have been mostly brought on the table in developing countries are to use private developers to to build homes and real estate market but you need to understand the urban policies as a whole right in Brazil we had a frequent recent housing program called my home my life we gave out a four million homes in a country but did not understand the issue concerning transportation or or public services as well so if you if you keep picking those part-time solutions they're they're going to actually aggravate the problem in the wrong long run those are the main consequences of the most extreme climate effects in Rio landslides and floodings and this is a picture from 2010 when you had an extreme event Jeffrey just like you had there and it killed 60 people in Rio it really made the mayor back then I was part of the administration understand that the climate policy could not be something that was a rhetorical priority but not an effective priority because we saw at present how how the climate the climate has has had been changing and how how how big the losses can be so we we basically start designed the the policies with mitigation of course and adaptation right what we call more recently resilience this is a mitigation we set up with legislation of climate change the first one in the city we do expecting to reduce 16% of the emissions from 2009 for 2016 we included that in the Olympic program of the city and of course we start from a lower base in terms of of per capita emissions this is a comparison from the emissions in Rio and other cities as well you as you can see the developed world has much larger tons per capita but that as I said before that doesn't mean we don't have to to act or do or do things this is the profile but we have to understand it the particular characteristics of of the in the emissions in Rio most of the emissions in the city are solid waste and transportation we don't emit much in how in housing and buildings like you do because of the to heat but so we have been working on this and all again the main policies were also included in the in the Olympic plan we built four BRT lines and also transferred our our waste disposal to a more modern landfill and a tree waste treatment center I would say and avoiding the emissions that were done before in terms of resilience this this is the center of operation this is a situation room again we took somewhat an advantage of having olympics to somewhat of attract partners to develop this this was a laboratory thing was was presented and in a TED talk by the mayor a few years ago and it has of course high-end technology to gather big data and try to predict our predictions of whether there are much much less accurate than you guys have here we yet have to yet to develop those weather models to to predict the weather is specifically in Rio but this more than the technology this shows that you know how this extreme events they don't choose anytime and they don't choose time to happen right you sometimes it goes overnight it goes on on on the weekends on holidays and you really need to adjust the coordination of your departments so not because of the technology but the most important thing I would say is to gather all the departments together this has over 30 departments and and taking decisions connecting in a very effective way to to to the mayor this was also in the Olympic plan usually things in Brazil end up being built or happening right before the event but I think the mayor after the reigns that we had in 2010 was clever in the sense that he would anticipate that somewhat of a situation room for that would happen just for the games and amplify that to something that would be to be lasting and to the city as a legacy and developing also some some technology and expertise we also designed the resilience plan Jeffrey just like you did in New Orleans we're part of the also the hundred resilience cities network it was the first plan in Latin America and of course this is it was a when it was an exercise on trying to think on in the long term building scenarios in terms of vulnerability of poor communities it's still in a very early stage in and try to predict those black swan scenarios as you mentioned we had recently the the upsurge of yellow fever in Brazil which which was a epitome that epidemic that was gone for over five decades and is is very little it's it's one out of two die and and as Michael said the combination of of elements sometimes aggravates the problem many of people today are not protected they don't have the vex the the necessary vaccine to the to to yellow fever and it is the same the way it spreads out is mostly by the mosquito of danger of the the Zika and and and if we if if you don't act fast in in the urban community to to try to control the problem that can create a catastrophe to the city so we have to be prepared for this unplanned events as well and of course planning for the future this is a picture of Guanabara Bay and the the recent renovated port area in Rio also one of the the Olympic legacies I remember when we were just in discussions in the in the municipal department on on how to plan the this renovation considering the elevation of sea level and of course the the somewhat the the culture and the the engineers didn't want to redo their plans or or or incorporate new variables but it was fortunately was enough in early in the in the project that we could pressure and reinforce the the protection against elevation of sea level and in fact this is not actually not going to be a very high area of elevation of of the sea level in Rio the west part will suffer more at least according to the the the models we have but still it showed that how how the climate component it's being slowly incorporated in the in the in the plan design of the city I think that's it I'll be here for questions and looking forward to the debate thank you so I will move us up farther north now going from New Orleans to Rio back to New York City and really appreciate the opportunity to be here as Michael mentioned I teach both at SIPA and a summa so it's nice to come to a building that I'm normally not in and learn more about what other programs are offering I also want to particularly thank Michael because the work that you do in the columns that you post on climate change are critically important you know as important as the science and making sure we're taking a data-driven approach and understanding our risk the storytelling is absolutely critical to make people understand what that risk means to make it relevant to people and to really catalyze action and the work that you've done and colleagues at the New York Times is really second to none I also want to note that as excited as I am and as positive I am about the role of cities and the importance of cities as Robigo noted and as you saw from the the first talk the innovative things the cities are doing I think this is the century of cities I think cities are the demonstrated leaders on so many issues that does not mean that our federal and state governments can abdicate their responsibility to take action so while we're doing amazing things the risk does loom for federal and state preemption to cut off many of the programs and the funding streams that have enabled New Orleans to recover and thrive so well that enabled New York to bounce back after what we faced here with Hurricane Sandy so stay positive stay excited but stay engaged so I want to talk quickly about the work that has been going on in New York and I do also apologize I'm gonna have to leave a little early from the discussion afterwards it's not because I'm running out because I'm scared of your questions I have a flight that I need to catch so my apologies for that what was interesting about New York and we've talked about climate and climate changes and opportunity all of our climate work in New York and our sustainability actions had absolutely nothing to do with climate change it started with this graph that projected that by the year 2030 New York was going to increase by million people and our mayor at the time Michael Bloomberg said well what does that mean what do we have to do to accommodate that growth because we think growth is good growth is necessary for the city we want to accommodate those people but we want to do so in a way that builds our economy and doesn't impinge on and actually enhances the quality of life for existing New Yorkers and we knew that meant that we needed to upgrade our infrastructure for anyone who recognizes this picture because you've been stuck in traffic on the BQE our infrastructure today in New York or in 2007 when we started on this question was already outdated and couldn't handle the traffic the flow pressures we were putting on it already forgetting about a million more people forgetting about climate change so we said we have a million more people we need to upgrade update our only aging and outdated infrastructure and we're in a global economy you actually don't need to live in New York anymore to work on Wall Street you don't need to have a Madison Avenue address to have an advertising firm you have to want to be here so how do we make a city that attracts the people that attracts the talent that attracts them the companies and their tax revenues to be here and you've seen this now as Nashville's a growing economy not because they have a history in finance a history in tech but because people want to live in that city so they're one of the fastest growing job centers and population centers in the country so we thought about well what do we do to make the city of place people want to be and we knew that climate change was a clear and present danger today when we were doing this this is pre-sandy but we knew we had heatwaves every year we had torrential downpours we had the August 8th 2007 rain burst that shut down the subway system so we knew that we faced real and significant climate risks without climate change we knew climate change is going to get worse how do we take that into account as we're thinking about our city's future and then we also and this has been added in more recent years much more explicitly any of these questions bring up the issues of equality and bring up the issues of social inclusion so how do you make these long-term infrastructure investments how do you think about the future of the city and do so in a way that raises you know everyone up in the city and makes more quality and addresses some of the social and economic inequalities that are systemic in our cities and in our societies so all that came out in a series of plans I recognized and appreciated your slide you know it started in 2007 with the release of plan yc which is the city's first comprehensive plan looking at the future of city from the 1965 kind of master plans for New York which had five or six tones each this big but that wide that I think were open once and then put on a shelf we wanted to have an actionable document we knew that we did not have all the answers in fact we weren't even asking all the questions in 2007 so we worked at the city council to enact a law that requires the city to update its sustainability plan once every four years every new mayor has to ask these questions what is the next 20 years look like for the city it has to incorporate climate change we have to do an annual progress report that publicly releases how we're doing on this you have to have updated climate change projections once every five years and we have to have a greenhouse gas inventory every year by law so we wanted to institutionalize this long-term planning so it wasn't another 40 years until you had someone coming along and begin to ask these questions so we had the plan yc update in 2011 post sandy we expanded that and took what was one chapter on climate resilience into over 200 page plan about how are we going to look at not to strengthen the city and reacting to sandy but how are we going to think about the long litany and list of risks that we face then and this is what our hope was the next administration came and because by law the city is required to update its sustainability plan you had the evolution into one NYC that was looking at what is that long-term future for the city and how do we want to address not just climate change but a lot of the threats we face I'm going to focus on what's in there and climate so we've talked about climate adaptation we've talked a lot about the risks we face we also on the other side of that corner of climate mitigation New York is the largest city in the world to commit to an 80% reduction in its GHG emissions by 2050 this is the waterfall chart that just gives you a sense of where those reductions have to come from unlike Rio the largest share for us is buildings over two-thirds of our emissions come from buildings 1.1 million buildings in the city you know the benefit of being in a small dense environment we have small apartments we have shared walls so we share the heat from our apartments next to us we can walk places means we have a lower carbon footprint when it comes to transportation but we need to clean up our building stock much of this is existing buildings we need to clean up our power supply we need to look at a transportation network but we're already pretty efficient the per capita foot carbon footprint of a New Yorker is one-third the national average because of a lot of these issues and then we get a little bit out of solid waste talked about buildings 1.1 million buildings in the city we really wanted to follow the data and under the mayor Bloomberg we looked at the information and found that just 2% of our building stock those are all the buildings that are under sorry over 50,000 square feet were responsible for half of the energy use in buildings so we had the choice of going after 20,000 buildings and there are large buildings usually owned by large companies very sophisticated management structures and saying we need to work with you to lower your carbon emissions or we could go after the other million building owners many of them small distributed and try to work with them we wanted to go after the 2% and so we had acted the greener greater buildings plan which required a whole series of lighting upgrades audits retrocommissioning processes benchmarking so that publicly disclose energy and water use and these large buildings and estimate that's going to be 5% reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions the single largest action the city could take at that time to reduce our carbon emissions just going after 2% of our building stock and by the way it would save those building owner 750 million dollars a year and reduce energy costs and we estimated we'd create about 18,000 jobs in the city looking at that opportunity side we also knew we needed to clean up our energy supply system the state is doing a large effort now and and Governor Cuomo deserves a lot of credit for the New York Rev a program that's looking at energy systems and distribution and transmission throughout the state we also know there's an opportunity in the city on distributed generation and things like Hurricane Sandy things like Katrina have taught us relying on big systems mean that they were more likely to fail and when they do fail you'll have catastrophic results I live in Lower Manhattan I was that dark part of the previous slide when we lost power thankfully I live on the third floor I could walk up and down but all of our buildings if you lose power and you're more than six stories tall you lose water and that is a bigger impact than power when you have two children and a wife and no water for five days so looking at distributed systems looking at utility scale solar and how can that help the city be more resilient as we meet our carbon reduction goal and looking at micro grids this is actually a pilot now that's happening in brooklyn 30 houses and brownstones are coming together they're installing solar on different rooftops they're actually sharing it within a network so you can buy it from your neighbor and have a distributed generation in a micro grid you know what are those innovations that we can look at that the city can help enable but it's really allowing private action and individuals to take more control of their destiny help us meet those long-term goals and enhance the resilience of the city transportation is a major issue in the city this was the traditional response you need to build more subways you need to go underground very expensive if you look at the history of the second avenue subway very long period of time to make it happen we are doing that that is important for the city but it's also looking about how you use your assets that already exist much better 25 of the city is the public right-of-way it's streets and sidewalks it's not well utilized when it's fully dedicated to cars how do we do things like introducing brt and taking ideas from curatiba and other cities in latin america that have long been pioneering new ways of better utilizing transportation we brought that to new york we launched the select bus service saw a 20 increase in ridership and a 20 increase in bus speeds and you can now see these throughout the city and continuing to be expanded we launched the city bike system i used to always joke that new york city has long had the largest and oldest bike share program in the world in the 1980s we had about 20,000 bikes stolen a year so we've had a long practice of sharing with our neighbors but we launched city bike in the bike share program and now in 2016 two-thirds of all rides on a bike share program in the us were in new york over 13 million rides on the city bike system something that people fought against thought didn't make sense and now is wildly successful and i think anyone who tries to get rid of it will face large challenges and we needed to look at the infrastructure to go before this expanding bike lanes making sure the infrastructure is there for bike parking but wildly successful at giving people more sustainable transportation options and as i said designing the cities not for cars not for modes of transportation but for people when i first moved to new york i and i still uh avoided time square because it looked like this and who would have thought that you could turn it literally overnight into a pedestrian plaza and bring that to neighborhoods throughout the city having a dramatic impact not only on the streets but increasing rents increasing retail value and the revenue that stores are having improving air quality and really creating hubs within communities so now there's a public plaza program where neighborhoods are volunteering and asking and applying to have plazas brought to their communities as you're doing all that as you're looking at your infrastructure public health i think if you're trying to get people engaged in climate change if you're trying to get them to think about it much more than greenhouse gas emissions much more than polar bears talking about the impact on public health is the way to motivate people and even in new york today eight percent of all deaths in the city can be attributed to poor air quality and again we followed the data and we understood that half of the air pollution in the city came from local sources and we found that just 10 000 buildings one percent of our building stock was responsible for more p.m. 2.5 than all cars and trucks combined and we knew where those buildings were they weren't moving around they were registered and staying in new york and it was because they were burning heavy heating oil which is how they're heating themselves which ends up in the plumes of smoke and it turns out that new york city we regulate boilers in the city every three years you need to renew your permit so we said you're stranded in the city we control you we regulate you every three years and you're the biggest source of local air pollution so this is what our air quality looked like in the winter of 2008 all these black areas are our air pollution areas and what was really interesting by putting street level air quality monitors out in the street and measuring where emissions were this is not an ej issue this is not something that's limited to low-income neighborhoods at that time mayor bloomberg who may not be considered a lower-income person lived on the upper east side worked in lower Manhattan you saw the upper west side the upper east side some of the wealthiest areas in the city had some of the worst air quality they had no idea it helped us build a much better political base to say this is a critical issue to focus on this is about the south Bronx this is about asthma rates but there is a large amount of people who need to come together to help address this issue because this is where a lot of the sources of air pollution were coming so we enacted legislation we phased out heavy heating oil we said you can't burn in anymore in the city you have to transition over the long term to much cleaner fuels there's a great stories behind the shenanigans and machinations had to happen with albany in the city council to make this happen but in just three years we went from this to that we phased out heavy heating oil in 6 000 buildings 65 drop in pm 2.5 from these buildings 70 reduction in overall sulfur emissions throughout the city new york city now has the cleanest air quality it's had in over 50 years we can only go back 50 years because that's when the record started just from one policy and this is the second biggest public health initiative during mary bloomberg's term after the smoking ban indoors so huge effort and it's helping us reduce our climate change emissions we never ever talked about that brings us to climate risk as well every inch of rain we get in the city it's a billion gallons of stormwater we need to capture treat store try to ameliorate before it goes into our water body so we don't pollute our water waste that is a really big challenge you can do it by building bigger treatment plants you can do it by increasing the size of your pipes you can do it by building underground storage tanks which have no value other than when it rains we think that there's a better way distributed generation i'm sure kate's going to talk a lot about this with green infrastructure and stormwater management where we're working now to capture the first inch of rain on 10 of the land area in the city and as i mentioned 25 percent of the city is hard escaped right of way 1.6 billion square feet of the city is rooftops there's a lot of opportunities to better utilize that area turning it into bioswales that neighborhood beautification help combat the urban heat island effect increase property value looking at green roofs looking at the green belt the blue belt in satin island so the city now is over 4 000 green infrastructure installations throughout the city that act as a distributed system to capture stormwater to retain it to hold it back so we don't have flooding events so we can have better water quality and we have a greener lusher city multiple multiple benefits and by the way it's cheaper than the traditional responses of gray infrastructure more complicated to try to make sure it works as a whole system you have to make sure that the regulators agree to it and have confidence it'll work but the benefits are really astronomical and that brings us then to our changing environment because one of our biggest challenges is we don't always know how to manage the environment we face and we have a changing environmental baseline so we know that we face sea level rise we know we face climate change in the city enormous amounts of the city are already in a 100 year flood plain those are those blue areas that includes jfk airport that includes new work that includes part of wall street with sea level rise that'll get even more of the city 25 of the city will be in a one in 100 year flood plain that does not mean that you have a one in 100 chance of a flood happening it means that if you bought a mortgage you have a one in three chance in the lifespan of your mortgage over 30 years that you're going to face a flood of eight to 13 feet it's a very different way of thinking about that I think would get people acting differently but there are things we can do about this you know man and cities have existed in flood plains and in climate risk areas forever they're always at confluence of rivers that's where the commerce is you have to acknowledge your risk and you have to account for it so there are a number of programs that are happening many of these predated sandy this is berkeland bridge park that was actually designed to accommodate flood so you have riprap uh so it can flood salt tolerant materials it faced little damage from sandy because it was designed with sea level rise and with coastal storms in mind there are new parks that are coming in that incorporate natural infrastructure and we took the lesson from norlands and you have hard-scaping both of those working together provide benefits and can reduce your risk we're looking at temporary solutions no one wants to live facing a wall people go to waterfront areas for a reason there is increased risk so how do you have mobile strategies that can be deployed and how do you face heat waves that's something that everyone always wants to talk about water more people die year from heat waves globally and from heat related impacts than any other natural hazard combined so we're painting rooftops white we're really looking at how do we change the dna of our city from our source systems to our rooftops and every facet of our built environment needs to change to incorporate and acknowledge and accommodate the risks that we face it can be done it can make a better city you have to do it you have to have the political will and that's at the leadership first but also from your legislative bodies you need to put the money behind it and in many cases it's not building brand new infrastructure it's adding 10 percent or five percent we were building a park in brooklyn bridge we needed to build it in a way that accommodated sea level rise accommodated climate change that may have added five or 10 to it and all things have to be personal the last that i want to end at is how i think about this and why i dedicate my life to this it's not because it's an esoteric issue this is my father who was born in 1945 at that time the mean annual temperature in new york was 53 degrees fahrenheit when i was born in 1976 we had already increased a degree in our mean annual temperature and new york saw three and a half inches of sea level rise at that point we're then seeing about two weeks worth of days over 90 degrees flash forward to my son being born in 2008 we'd already increased another degree temperature we'd seen four more inches of sea level rise in new york when my son goes to college roughly and this always dates me when people laugh at this if they know the movie or not you're going to see even more in temperature increase we're going to be about 58 degrees our manual temperature in new york that's five degrees increase from my father was born four degree increase from when i was born it means we go from 18 days a year over 90 degrees to 30 degrees a full month over 90 degrees that means amtrak has to slow down and speed restrictions come in it means our power grid can melt huge health risks and more increased mortality and mortality rates we see infrastructure aging faster you may have to change your your airplanes and your runways to account for changes in air density and we're going to see at that point now two feet of sea about a foot of sea level rise from when my father was born and when you flash forward to when my son may have a child we're seeing a dramatically different city the mean annual temperature has gone up almost 10 degrees we're now at 61 degrees fahrenheit you're seeing two months maybe of days over 90 degrees that's a dramatically different city and you're seeing two feet of sea level rise so for me i don't think about this is something that's theoretically going to happen i care about my son i care about his family uh should he choose to have one this is going to have real impacts on what the world looks like this is a real and existential threat that we face there are solutions to it we need to have the will and the resources behind it to address it so thank you for being here and for inviting me so do we want to start with the responses okay i i'm kate orf thank you so much i have a very brief response and because i'm quite interested in getting to the questions there's so much to be learned from the sort of shared experiences um i guess you know first of all just this a moment of sort of celebration and acknowledgement of all the successes that have been able to be achieved at the city scale and i thought some of my remarks are more along the lines of what are the the limits of the scale of the city relative to climate change because i feel that and you know adam had had brought this up in his remarks that clearly cities are taking the lead relative to climate adaptation it may be our only choice right at this moment because cities are obviously large agglomerations and densities of populations that have a shared future and and and so i think that the i would just say to to break that idea down into the limits of the scale of city into two two sort of larger buckets one being the the kind of zone of regulatory challenges and governance right and each of these kind of large projects described there has to be an alignment of city state and federal at least in the state side context an alignment of of goals and without that alignment then the funding scenarios become incredibly difficult any project that goes outside a scale of any sort of a regional a sort of very localized context um requires a much sort of much more buy-in if you will on the city from a state and federal context and the second bucket i wanted to to um talk about is literally not only the sort of governance scale of the city but literally the physical spatial scale of the city as a kind of a limit to addressing climate change because um you know i think the the graph that you showed would be also of the the list of the highest the the most intense economies going from um United States to um Los Angeles to ExxonMobil to Barcelona really shows that the these networks of of power the sort of fundamental economic and or economy-wide reallocations and revaluing of of these systems of fossil fuel generated energy sources and the larger scale value shifts that do need to occur to address climate change not just adaptation or you know altering the physical landscape um are truly those that as i would totally agree you know require uh pressure at a kind of a federal scale um and it's these um these two issues that i'd i'd be interested in talking more about thank you um i'm Wei Ping Wu um really enjoyed your presentations and particularly impressed by how much the equity angle and social justice angle are in your considerations i'd like to actually follow up Kate's remarks in the sense that i think climate change really significantly aggravates this conflict or tension between market and policy that is um it really calls for far more collective action in a sense both across scales as well as across different population segments and the interesting part is i hear this wonderful work that New Orleans is doing in terms of multi uh mobilizing uh communities to plan ahead of time but we also know that as people become more urban the more traditional social networks and relations disappear so we know when people move from rural to urban areas that kind of connection that kind of self-help networks uh disappear or are reduced but we also know there's research that has shown for instance in Chicago the heat waves that the presence of social capital and networks are very significant in reducing um um you know fatality as well as increasing recovery and so as we look at all of these uh very effective strategies to overcome the inertia in the built environment can we think about also ways in which the urban built environment is reconstructed first to facilitate more interactions or to facilitate what you know Robert Putman would call you know the churches of the neighborhood right where in which you would increase more interactions and in some northern european city designs sort of communal shared housing especially when we were looking already at a huge increasing elements of shared economy and governance in cities and i was reading a little bit about the you know the proposed plan for the Hudson yard in terms of the exhibition the architectural space and that kind of you know sort of new kinds of built environment that could really rethink and help us rethink the human interactions among each other not so right now we're sort of addressing more of the human and environmental interactions and i i think you know climate change gives us that opportunity perhaps to think together in that sense is that is something that i think it's bringing in further elements in addition to the environmental justice elements that i have been in here and i would love to hear what you have to add so i'm i'm really glad that that way ping and kate moved this conversation instantly into the two areas which are both critical to climate change and also are in a way the i'm sure the problem that you're all aware of and those do have to do with governance and the governance on different levels because you know let's face it there's a whole kind of rhetoric of the city and the mayor which has been developed which along with the the boxes that can be ticked by mayors to prove that they have you know the right climate strategies and all those are good but are entirely ineffectual if you do not have governance at a larger scale and no bike lane is in itself going to solve rio's climate and other problems and then this i think this session this issue that way ping brings up which is so key and i'm glad you mentioned eric line bird's book to this question of social resilience as being inextricable from um from climate resilience because we know uh and several of you brought this up too i that really everybody did i think in some context that the climate is not just about building levies it's not just about creating you know sponge parks it's it does have on some fundamental level to do with creating community and to creating an environment of social justice and environmental justice which prepares people for the problems that we will have i think one of the interesting things you know in the case of a country like the netherlands which is always held up for for all the annoying reasons as as the perfect country nonetheless one of the interesting things about the strategy there is it is so tied to social uh social resilience um as well and this notion that somehow you know the the communities have to be they can't just exist behind um levies but i but i mentioned it not just to remind people of the annoying netherlands but also to um raise one other issue i just wanted to talk to about this a little bit and that is in a place like that they um they complain that people have become complacent because if you build this relationship between public awareness and participation and um and sort of the gray infrastructure and other governmental sort of efforts it is a is a constant balancing act in the netherlands people have come to feel that water has been taken care of and so this question of emergency preparedness and that kind of community resilience is an issue um so i just wanted to raise that myself as one thing and then i was going let me just plunge in with a direct question um so in rio um my impression is and maybe this is a way of saying can you talk about some of the countervailing um the tensions you had the olympics which was supposed to be an accelerator of um progressive urban redevelopment and adding uh rapid bus and so forth um you had a lot of social conflict uh that um was around some of the olympic construction and my impression is that a lot of the olympic redevelopment along the waterfront into the north um was one thing but there's also a persistent economically driven um and class division driven uh sprawl to the west and gated communities um and so correct me i see like rio is a really interesting case of two countervailing strongly countervailing and sort of canceling out tendencies um and i'm just wondering if you could talk to that and and how because it's not you're not alone in that how you deal with that kind of attention today just start uh well starting from your last question um of course rio is in uh is a somewhat of um higher uh level of inequality than um new york which is an equal city for for american standards um but and i think the there was a lot of misconception and misunderstanding on on the developments like in a specific of the what we broadly call the olympic investments or the recent investments in the city uh almost all of the investment was done in the poor areas of rio which traditionally lacked of for example public service as transportation so all the brt lines were done connecting the the the area of the sea that had absent public access to transportation also there was a large expansion of health care uh we went from two percent of the population covered by primary care to over 50 percent of the population and built over 70 health family clinics or basically uh health care units that uh focused on the most needed areas of the sea but in fact to to to read to make such a strong intervention in this in the city's tissue there was needed uh in relocations but to build both corridors that would benefit the whole society and what we have had now looked in the past years is that that helped to reduce inequality in the city but this is a long-term challenge and i would say uh there is a so somewhat of a collective learning about uh the community feeling i think regardless we were talking about this how deep rooted deep rooted uh culture in the community engagement can be valuable to the development of communities both in real New Orleans New York in in its sense as well and uh we're taking advantage of something like that but it's a long-term challenge yeah so you know responding to two of the previous comments and then following with that you know the the role of cities in the idea of connected other areas you know two statistics with that 70 of global emissions come from cities which is the good news the national renewable energy laboratory did a report that estimated what proportion of the carbon reductions in the u.s needed to meet the Paris Agreement could come from cities they estimated on a moderate scale 15% under a super aggressive scenario 35% so cities are really important but they're not the whole story in new york how we can get to 80 by 15 how we measure that out on the energy side it's fully dependent on the rps the renewable portfolio standard in new york state that projects that 50% of the energy in the state is going to come from renewable energy by 2030 if that doesn't happen if we can't clean up our power supply you know we can get a lot through efficiency in buildings and that's really important but if they're drawing from you know if you're drawing a hybrid car but it's still pulling or an electric vehicle from a coal power plant that's a major problem so cities are important but others talking about markets you know i think the two challenges we face or big challenge we face is pricing that nothing there's no price on carbon there's no price on the externalities caused by pollution we don't price risk well so people live in risky areas because insurance is so low that's right because they can build there and our bonds are really bad you know you can get a 30 year bond or a city can go for a municipal bond to build something new in a higher risk area and there's no downgrading or increased percentage rate that they have to repay that on likewise renewable energy and some of the carbon climate mitigation strategy viewed as riskier than fossil fuel investments even though there's greater price fluctuation of fossil fuels so we're not pricing these things correctly um maybe i'll stop there and let others answer like social cohesion yeah i i want to go back to the the comment about cities and mayors and and i think you know our mayor is a member of all the networks and we actually believe in the philosophy that that mayors can make change but then i think one of the things that we're beginning to think more strategically about is between cities and metros regions the regions yeah totally and and um you know in the u.s. and and all over the world cities and the regions that they are in sometimes have varying political factions against each other the big city versus the smaller suburbs or the smaller towns or the other areas of the region and really in order for us to continue to scale up what we need to do we have to be more involved in regions so you know new orleans has a very strong mayor form of government same as new york city and and other cities but the ability for us to to go beyond the city scale and go up to the regional scale and the jurisdictions outside of cities is that much more important to make uh to make that change i mean when we look at at new orleans in particular you know sea level rise as an impacts the city of new orleans also impacts the neighboring jurisdictions right that's all linked together what's done at the coast impacts us all so the ability to get beyond the the strong leadership of the strong mayors but get beyond that and bring our regions together is is even more important i was in melbourne australia two months ago and they really are thinking hard about melbourne itself is very small and there are i think 33 governments around melbourne that make up what you would normally conceive of as the city of melbourne i mean it's contiguous you don't even know you're in a different place and so the ability there to get 33 other governments around the issues that the city of melbourne itself which is actually quite small is putting forth as strong leadership i think is is the next level that we have to get to um because these issues cross boundaries this is not just about the cities and then on the national level you know uh mayor landrew uh will be coming into being the president of the us conference of mayors and one of the things that we're thinking very hard about is uh how mayors can exert political muscle and how mayors as groups can push national governments not just in the us but around the world to a different place and and that's sort of at this point where we have to really focus our energies because that that's where we are and then the last thing i'll say on the on the piece about traditional ways of life and traditional connections as as we were talking about where you're going we're talking about new Orleans has a very strong culture carnival based culture very much like brazil and those carnival organizations are very deeply held deeply seated connections for social cohesion in the city however what's happening is with the scale of this of course is quite different from new york but what's happening with affordable housing and housing affordability where we have uh 57 percent of the people of new Orleans who are spending almost over 50 percent of their income on housing and you're seeing massive displacement as new investment comes into the city that's starting to disrupt those traditional cultural connections and and that is concerning for us because that is where you get the cohesion and that's where you get the ability for people to take care of one another which is critically important as we move into the future so it's a connection as you were saying makeable before this is a web of connections between in in this particular case culture housing uh and and the outcomes of being able to be resilient that that it begins to become a cultural preservation issue as well can i just build on for two seconds on the the regional point too because i i find that to be an incredibly important point and in the in the urban design studio in the past couple of years we've we've done we've a series of studies on global cities and climate adaptation and but rather we found very quickly like when we went to Rio last year we didn't stay in Rio all the students were quite disappointed that they weren't dancing and the the parades we went out along the Rio Parahiba river which is really the source of the drinking water frankly for Rio right so you really have to look at an upstream environment similarly this year um we're looking at both Aman Jordan and the Jordan river valley and in and um at Calcutta India you know omega city which is in and obviously different scale but like New Orleans is highly interdependent upon it a regional wetland ecosystem um which is at the Ganges Delta so it's funny how we you know even in just trying to address this topic our entire frame of defining what a city is if you will has has changed yeah maybe just to really quickly follow off of that there are precedents you know so if you look at Chesapeake Bay right in Virginia Maryland there's long tradition of that cross state even um collaboration of course requires political will and the commitment but you know it's interesting why Michael you were writing the article about China you know all Chinese cities are one big government it doesn't necessarily lend itself to really you know progressive actions and so I think certainly there's that in there but I think if you look at London the greater London has been able to achieve many things that are equally challenging yeah yeah I mean I think as as you were saying this I was thinking you're right about Melbourne in that same country Sydney does not have the same municipal agreements and that's a very good example of a federal government that national government which has been reluctant shall we say to deal with climate issues so you know you can you can have in certain places where that's the cohesion possibility I mean even in New York God knows you don't have a better example of the ways in which what seemed like even basic simple moves like congestion pricing which worked in London is not possible here because the suburban commuters and don't want it and Albany doesn't want it so it's very difficult I think one of the one of the key things is finding strategies finding common ground and find shaping arguments that may be climate driven ultimately but are serve other purposes finding common ground across those political and social divides is is really the way to begin to build those coalitions political and other coalitions I'm sorry Adam left at that moment because one of the things he talked about when he came to my class we were using as a kind of example the plastic bag ban and that which failed in New York and where it has worked in other cases and how one could reframe this you know it's not going to solve all of our environmental problems but it seems like a on one level a no-brainer and that in the Chesapeake area there was a there was a kind of coalition of different people around whom the idea of cleaning the river became something that was a sort of socially yeah here it got tied up in the Albany in the governor mayor issues and in the idea that this the money would go back to the store so maybe there the point is strategically beginning to think of policy as something that can build those coalitions on a case-by-case basis and a city-by-city basis there isn't a kind of toolkit of interchangeable parts yeah I think the metropolitan challenge is like it's a huge anywhere in Brazil there is some specific situations after the constitution of 88 states federal government and municipalities have the same level of let's say as institutions tree level but there's no metropolitan coordination it's pretty much up to the state governor to have the its own leadership and and as we said before in fact the national governments have not pushed this agenda forward but of course as metropolitan areas grow the the the problems become more and more integrated and we really need to change that that perception and start to think I think climate change in the environment are natural issues that this this lack of governance brings about I mean they should be but let's face it for most people and this is certainly true of most Americans if they even acknowledge climate change exists it is not high on their list of demands for a lot of understandable reasons but I do think that things that are related to climate change whether it's I mean in in China clean air I mean that's a that's a very clear issue so one can again target certain ideas and issues without having to have buy-in from everybody that climate change is the is the driver to that point I'll just posit this we had a conversation last week or two weeks ago I serve on the governor's advisory commission for coastal restoration and we're talking about the state's coastal master plan which is regional and and and has built on 30 years of of talking about coastal restoration which really comes from the fisheries industry that was sort of the entree into that conversation many years ago but and when we're looking at funding and how do we talk about this what what came up in that meeting very publicly and a lot of discussion about is the national defense issues related to sea level rise in climate change for cities across the U.S. military installations both in the U.S. and around the world that the government controls and the fact that the defense department was the first to recognize climate change in the U.S. government and so do we pivot to having a conversation of climate change as a national defense issue in order to raise the awareness and raise the issues around it in this current environment and there was a really serious conversation of that how do you how do you continue to get attention in this when when the U.S. defense department sees it as one of their most existential threats so it's a really interesting way of trying to weave you know conversations to make this relevant. Yeah absolutely I mean I think in all cases that's a really great example that defense and economic development I mean the reason London has been so effective of course is because London basically is the British economy you know I think it counts for a third or almost 40 percent of the economy so the massive investments in infrastructural development and new transit or all that sort of thing and the government is based in London too it's it's an easier argument but it can be made in other cases as well where's the economy growing you know the I'll shut up but I should let you guys talk more but one of the things that occurs to me as we're speaking is climate change is linked as we see to urbanization urbanization is linked to the climate problems that have caused rural failures and in some cases conflict that causes migration and those urban rural divisions which are linked to climate change are expressed in the United States as well in political terms so the question becomes how do we bridge this conversation across rural urban divides and show people that somehow these are shared problems it's complicated because the political constituencies are quite different and the perception of resources and division of resources is different people in red states think that blue states are taking more money from from the till the federal till even though it's in fact the other way around and you know that that is a really difficult mindset to change it has to I think to stem from a feeling that this step whether it's defense or some kind of economic corporate benefit is going to help them so I have to leave so you're leaving too this is like musical chairs thank you if you could expand that point in your book I think that will be an excellent book because I do feel like at least in the US context that is literally the crux of the problem right now I think the other just to build on that point is the other issue is around just representational governance I mean I think the the the borough of the Bronx is the same population as West Virginia for example right so so you have those those challenges relative to the urbanization of the United States and how and how these now this influx back and how this projects forward is is a tremendous question I do feel like also concept of storytelling and narrative is critical escape our offices also begun to work more in places that have are not you know are primarily we initially primarily focused on coastal flooding but the fact is there's riverine flooding there's increased tornadoes in many so projects now in North Dakota where people are looking for some of the same strategies that are you know I think that you know the the key is to try to develop a series of physical interventions that themselves beget and kind of trigger more social cohesion right so that the physical remaking of the environment works in tandem with the kind of a social project there's risks in that I suppose but I I do feel like that is part of the key relative to you know your the remark about you know how to how can we see climate adaptation as a benefit and as a way to improve and so if we can somehow understand and and and shift the the discussion just away from coastal flooding in the blue states which it is not it is about increased risk in in almost you know and and every micro environment or every regional economy and and shift that discussion and that that that that will be a critical a critical shift to build that social cohesion we need the last thing we should be talking about is carbon and translate to that to the communities and what the message to the Bronx is different to North Dakota is different in the rich areas of Rio and is different in the poor communities of Rio we still talk the same even like us here yeah we are still talking the same scientific approach or which is then the root of the problem but we need to to get to build that coalition to build better governments we need to translate that to yeah I mean I think it comes out of a very basic economic argument as well I mean the the the argument for resilience works on all economic levels but it's rarely made it's made as a kind of ethical moral and environmental issue and that is in itself I think a social divider but there's a good economic reason to do two things on that I think the the outreach and community education in the language that people speak is important as you were saying we're we're using highly technical language but being able to translate that highly technical language into what matters for people the most and and meeting them where they are I think is is important and I think a lot of places we've started to do that and I I think you know we are in in architecture school I think it is extremely important I believe it's extremely important that we we do have physical tangible things for people to see as demonstrations that can start to try to change some behavior so we you know one of the first things that we did we started a pilot program to build demonstration rain garden sites that had educational signage and we worked with the community groups to put them together so that people could start to understand what we're talking about and understand the risk and as those things it's been in for about four years now now they understand it now people are embracing it and they actually understand how it works because they can actually see it and that builds the capacity for you to do more but that was based on sort of a very localized neighborhood based design process that led to pilots that then people could see touch feel understand see work over time that can lead you to sort of the larger-scale interventions that we're doing now but but this isn't a natural thing for people to just understand what we're talking about and so you have to be able to talk about it in a way that people can understand it and I felt feel very strongly about you have to do some sort of demonstration so that they can see feel touch smell proof of concept yeah I mean one and then maybe we open it up to some questions but one one Kate is involved with one of the rebuild projects but another one of the rebuild projects which is the big U that many people in this room may know about I think is an interesting example of this kind of doing one thing and talking about another thing essentially which is that while lower Manhattan you know is threatened and in a hypothetical world we should not have you know our entire economic future based on the buildings that are there they're not going to go away so the question becomes how do we protect that so this idea of building a soft border has been around for a while but the the project the big U as it's called that that is beginning there starts if after all with a little segment not so little but pretty little at a place where the East River is adjacent to public housing projects which have been very underserved without access to the river and without recreation space and so forth so the project is sold that part of it at least is sold as it doesn't have to be sold as a climate thing it doesn't have to be sold as an a proof of concept of a essentially a levy but as a community benefit and equity based for a mayor coming in as well who's running on this that kind of strategy that's right I think is you know absolutely the only way to build buy-in especially community buy-in do we want to do we have some questions sure studies today of cities and climate action especially if you elect the right political leadership as we did in this city at one time almost miracles can happen the picture of Times Square is a case in point but what concerns me and we've kind of danced into and out of it if we change the word cities to intergovernmental relations and climate action and the regionalism thing which held great promise decades ago when the federal government actually promoted it graduate students studied it and I did and we even taught it it's all forgotten now people aren't interested in it as much and then finally big elephant in the room based on all those executive orders that have been signed recently is the federal government and instead of climate action being something that everybody can embrace and kumbaya with it becomes a political thing and it seems one major party doesn't even believe in it so in conclusion i'd like to ask the panel are you at all optimistic about intergovernmental relations and climate action because i'm not i'm very optimistic about your cities and climate action because you're demonstrating what's going on and the best is yet to come you know i i remain cautiously optimistic but to be honest i you know we get a new executive order every day two or three we have no idea what's going on and i think to be honest in the u.s. and and you know we're networks with cities all around the country i think we've all just decided that we need to do what we can and we have to just react i mean we literally this is not even a joke every day all of our cities communications teams are reacting because there's something new every single day this is a this is a completely different territory than we've ever been in before and so you'll see i probably have four or five emails now going around between different cities and are you know is your mayor going to sign on to this thing that we have to send today i mean it's just a we're in a completely different environment that that we i don't think we're necessarily prepared for so i have to say i'm cautiously optimistic but it remains to be seen i mean with this administration they say one thing one day and then turn around to do something exactly opposite the next day so you just don't know where you stand this is this is very much so shifting sand here in the u.s. yeah i think i think we're needing leadership right cities have show showed the action within their boundaries maybe it's about to now time to the mayors now to advocate more in a national and intergovernmental level brazil is also going to its own in our intergovernmental crisis as well and as i said in my in my speech uh this is the perfect area for constructive perspectives not destructive perspectives you know i i wrote about mexico city in this series and if you talk to officials in mexico city they say the same sorts of things that the representatives from rio and and who wants to say we you know we have the following agenda we're trying to do um and when i then asked you to start to inquire about and what kind of support you get from the federal government which is in league with a lot of this it's very similar to the united states and that you have a federal government which sort of it supports private development sprawl highways uh every single thing that thwarts uh the efforts by that city if you ask you know uh how that works they will tell you it doesn't work in fact the federal government recently uh in mexico city cut to zero all funding for all of these programs that uh including public transit period because the mayor of mexico city was threatening to run for president and so was challenging so this is not unique to the united states where there are in any case existing hurdles legal and otherwise for the current administration to overcome they can't completely undo everything but saying that it's a huge problem which is definitely the case is not the same as saying that the only real way to move forward is somehow trying to build larger alliances or find common ground you know when interesting case will be infrastructure the president said he's interested in doing something infrastructural and then it turns out he just wants to fund his friends you know tax breaks for highways but think about it you have a project like gateway a critical tunnels under the hudson river which are bound up with all the issues we're talking about here which are also which is also critical to the development of the west side and who is here is what is close to this advisor on infrastructure one of the developers runs vornado who has massive investments around penn station on the west side of manhattan so before we decide that this is a completely dysfunctional situation in which there's no hope of you know and we've learned this maybe some things need to be played out over a period of time i'm not saying i'm not sounding too optimistic but i'm just saying i personally am not convinced that this is an impossible situation even at the moment if we can find these occasional places yeah one more question somebody out there yeah where is that hand yeah okay so just quickly i thought one very important example missing from this conversation which i hugely appreciate and respect for the the information and analysis she presented is paris and i'm not talking about the paris treaty i'm talking about paris planning yeah and i am a little biased because i have a book contract to write about regional planning in paris but the front have had of course state led capitalist planning and highly dirige stand and they didn't even have a mayor of paris until 69 not since the revolution so it really was the state with kind of what you could call a i don't know uh a colonial governor the prefe who took care of everything and while nobody was looking around 1965 they managed to come up with a regional plan for the entire region that included was really very well coordinated all things considered i mean there were many mistakes and it happened to coincide with the native architectural design but that was a piece of it but you know they created la défense is the big so they didn't you know destroy the center of paris they created the new towns they created but most importantly transportation which is what they are excellent at and i want to point out one other quick thing about paris in that back uh when the french environmental movement became very big around seven in the early seventies the environmental poster uh was of the fifth arrondissement one of the most densely populated urban areas and i won't say the world but certainly in the western world and at the same time in the united states our poster which was a sierra club poster was you know depicted a human being i'll say no gender uh sort of contemplating nature in a state of solitude so i think that goes a long way towards explaining a certain uh kind of what we were talking about rural and urban but anyway a certain view of nature environment i would add to that the recent um change to uh the the governance structure um of of paris with the metropolitan government coming into play which which adds another layer of that sort of more regional thinking in the ill de france and that entire area yeah but one of the things about that change is that the i would respectfully just disagree a little bit with what you said because of course what actually happened when you had the the the growth of paris was that you had the periphery which created a center and pushed all of the bolio the the suburbs on the outskirts to uh not all but many of them impoverished and you had a hub a hub and spoke a system of transportation so that they couldn't their only jobs were coming into central paris and so there are there are fundamental structural problems at paris that is have always revolved around the centrality of of paris and uh this new metropolitan paris and the notion of creating a transit system which will um go connect some of the out our lines of the suburbs to each other not just the center this is in a way remedial work which i think um is along the lines of what we're talking about how to create a larger city and a more equitable city as well i would i would hope i can only agree thank you thank you everybody i hope that was enjoyable