A Hurricane in Perspective

The weekend of October 27, 2012 was intended to be an unremarkable but relaxing getaway to Washington, D.C. to enjoy time with my family; however, our trip was cut short that Sunday morning after deciding to return to New York to beat a storm that had been forecasted for later that evening. Although we made it home safely and without delay, we were unprepared for what was to come.

Hurricane Sandy, as the storm was since named, wreaked far more havoc than we could have anticipated. Over several days, it had ravaged through the Caribbean and Bermuda, parts of Canada, and the Eastern coast and Midwest regions of the U.S. In New York City, it caused millions of us to lose power and impaired the electrical grid for weeks (affecting some for months). It flooded some subway tunnels completely, requiring years of repair until their eventual restoration. It displaced thousands of residents whose homes had either been completely tarnished or were now in need of significant repairs. And these are just a few of many issues that resulted from the storm.

It took years of recovery efforts——many of which are still ongoing——to restore the city from the effects of that storm. I thought (and still think) about Hurricane Sandy often; it was, after all, a traumatic experience that disrupted many of our lives and remains a recurrent threat, as with Hurricane Ida just last year. I’ve seen so many stories on the news about other natural disasters that had adversely impacted so many other cities and still had not believed we’d be at risk; having lived through it, I now know that we are.

In 2014 I started a new job working in a disaster preparedness capacity, and one of my primary projects introduced me to climate resiliency initiatives, focusing specifically on post-Sandy coastal storm preparedness and response. Climate resilience is not a new concept; scientists and academics first introduced this concept within the context of ecological system preservation during the 1960’s and 70’s as they attempted to better understand how natural systems were impacted by, and responded and adapted to, external changes. While the definition of climate resilience has since become more nuanced, it generally examines adaptation to climate change through a socio-ecological lens. With respect to urban landscapes specifically (or the “built environment”), climate resilience attempts to understand whether these ecosystems are capable of recovering from external, undesirable climate-related events, and the proposed requirements for doing so.

The theoretical and empirical frameworks that underscore the urgency of climate change are neither straightforward nor universally accepted; however, we should acknowledge what we know to be true: more disasters are occurring, and they pose direct and indirect risks to us all. Whether by wildfire, heatwave, or hurricane (like Sandy and Ida), climate disasters are causing significant damage at an unsustainable rate.

So, what can we do? I think that understanding the foundation of climate change and climate resiliency is a good approach, and I hope to deconstruct these concepts through a series of posts that will explore our climate and ecosystems, the climate resilience framework and its related components, and current and proposed resiliency efforts around the country and the rest of the world. 

In the next post, I will try my best to explain the basics of climate resilience.  Stay tuned!

-T