With most of New York City surrounded by water, climate change poses a grave threat to its infrastructure, as devastating storm surges and coastal flooding have shown. Inland blocks are in danger, too.
Researchers at the New York Botanical Garden have created a new interactive map of the city showing the areas most at risk of flooding. They’re calling them “Blue Zones,” places where water is, used to be, or will be due to climate change. More than one-fifth of the city is in a Blue Zone, according to a paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
“Everybody was startled, including us,” Eric Sanderson, vice president of urban conservation at the New York Botanical Garden and an author of the paper, told The City.
The hope is that this information will help city officials, planners, and residents better prepare for the effects of climate change. While resiliency infrastructure has hardened the coastline, some of the most disruptive and deadly floods have happened in inland areas where aging infrastructure isn’t able to handle heavy rainfall.
To identify the Blue Zones, researchers studied more than 500 years’ worth of flood data and integrated intel from 311 service calls and flood maps from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Critically, they also examined maps of the city’s natural hydrology. Even though urbanization paved over ponds, streams, and salt marshes, these geographic elements continue to influence flooding today.
“Understanding the historical ecology—particularly the geographic distribution of streams and wetlands prior to the construction of the city—can help reframe the way we see the current urban landscape, promote ideas about how we adapt to current realities, and prepare for future contingencies,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Some areas identified as Blue Zones may seem surprising, especially those that are far away from visible bodies of water.
“It shows how large scale this is and it lets you look at the city as a landscape,” Lucinda Royte, manager of urban conservation, data tools, and outreach at the New York Botanical Garden and coauthor of the paper, told The City. “We currently view the city through its political boundaries. We care about neighborhoods and zip codes, but water doesn’t care about those boundaries.”