An Assessment Framework for Cities Coping with Climate Change: The Case of New York City and its PlaNYC 2030

Abstract

Climate change and its resulting uncertainties challenge the concepts, procedures, and scope of conventional approaches to planning, creating a need to rethink and revise current planning methods. This paper proposes a new conceptual framework for assessing city plans based on the idea of sustainability and planning countering climate change. It applies this framework to assess the recent master plan for the city of New York City: PlaNYC 2030. The framework consists of eight concepts that were identified through conceptual analyses of the planning and interdisciplinary literature on sustainability and climate change. Using the proposed conceptual framework to evaluate PlaNYC 2030 reveals some of the merits of the Plan. PlaNYC promotes greater compactness and density, enhanced mixed land use, sustainable transportation, greening, and renewal and utilization of underused land. With regard to the concept of uncertainty, it addresses future uncertainties related to climate change with institutional measures only. From the perspective of ecological economics, the Plan creates a number of mechanisms to promote its climate change goals and to create a cleaner environment for economic investment. It offers an ambitious vision of reducing emissions by 30% and creating a "greener, greater New York," and links this vision with the international agenda for climate change. On the other hand, the assessment reveals that PlaNYC did not make a radical shift toward planning for climate change and adaptation. It inadequately addresses social planning issues that are crucial to New York City. NYC is "socially differentiated" in terms of the capacity of communities to meet climate change uncertainties, and the Plan fails to address the issues facing vulnerable communities due to climate change. The Plan calls for an integrative approach to climate change on the institutional level, but it fails to effectively integrate civil society, communities, and grassroots organizations into the process. The lack of a systematic procedure for public participation throughout the city's neighborhoods and among different social groupings and other stakeholders is a critical shortcoming, particularly during the OPEN ACCESS Sustainability 2014, 6 5899 current age of climate change uncertainty. Practically, the proposed conceptual framework of evaluate appears to be an effective and constructive means of illuminating the Plan's strengths and weaknesses, and appears to be an easy-to-grasp evaluation method, and should be easily understood and applied by scholars, practitioners and policy makers.

Impact of Brownfield Sites on Local Energy Production as Resilient Response to Land Contamination: A Case Study in Italy

“…How to have a resilient approach/response to the problem, trying to prefigure concrete and not-often-utopian scenarios for the achievement of urban-territorial transformations? Some recent publications deal both with the multidisciplinary and complex nature of urban resilience [18,19] and with the measures for the resilient city of the future [20,21]. If, on the one hand, the higher costs of intervention due to the site reclamation need important public actions to increase the attractiveness of these transformations (reduction of urbanization costs, greater volume, etc.…”

Mapping Cross-Boundary Climate Change Vulnerability—Case Study of the Hualien and Taitung Area, Taiwan

“…Due to increased frequency and severity of climate change and environmental disasters in recent years, traditional environmental impact studies have gradually transformed into vulnerability and resilience (i.e., adaptability) studies [1]. That is, recent studies have focused on methods of assessing the capacity of a society to continue operations after it has been impacted by disasters, and its capacity to recover after the impact [5,12,[15][16][17].…”

“…Vulnerability is also dynamic, because it will change according to the change of biophysical and socio-economic attributes [20]. Moreover, a more comprehensive and integrated interpretation of the vulnerability concept can be depicted as a function of three inter-related elements: exposure, sensitivity and adaptable capacity [1,17,20,23].…”

“…To apply vulnerability to a more comprehensive environmental planning, Lee [12] used GIS data at the township level and overlaid biophysical vulnerability and social vulnerability to examine integrated vulnerability in Chiayi, Taiwan. Jabareen [17] proposed a new conceptual framework for assessing city plans based on the idea of sustainability and planning countering climate change and applied this framework to assess the recent master plan for the city of New York: PlaNYC 2030.…”

Conceptual Framework for Assessing the Sustainability of Forest Fuel Reduction Treatments and Their Adaptation to Climate Change

“…The conceptual framework is used to evaluate the veracity of the two statements for adaptation of fuel reduction treatments (FRTs) to climate change in forested landscapes. The integrative, quantitative framework presented here differs from evaluation frameworks, such as the one developed by Jabareen [1], that apply various concepts of sustainability to a plan in a qualitative manner without integrating those concepts in a manner that allows identification of the most preferred plan.…”