Future Brooklyn May Be All Washed Up, Says Scientist

A Columbia scientist has produced a NYC version of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gotham Gazette reports, showing how climate change could wreak havoc on New York City over the next 80 years. The report, put together by Klaus Jacob, a special research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, illustrates how new developments on the Brooklyn waterfront—especially in Williamsburg and Greenpoint—could be flooded by strong storms:

Areas of the Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront slated for development that will bring tens of thousands of new residents stand a major risk of being flooded by a hurricane, according to the city’s own maps. Sewers in Greenpoint already cannot deal with the rainwater from severe storms, such as those of last July and August…Much of the new development “will occur along the East River waterfront, which is subject to flooding from storm surges. New construction will result in significant changes to the floodplain that may reduce its capacity for flood retention or alter stormwater flow characteristics, said Brooklyn Community Board One’s Rezoning Task Force in comments on the draft of an Environmental Impact Statements on rezoning the area to accommodate more development.

Scary stuff. The city is starting to try to face the disastrous problems that climate change may cause by creating a multi-agency Climate Change Task Force aimed at protecting infrastructure and looking to upgrade sewer systems. Jacob, meanwhile, says the city should reconsider allowing any new development on low-lying, flood prone areas. “That,” he says, is the “price to be paid for pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”
City by the Sea—or Underneath It? [Gotham Gazette]
Klaus H. Jacob illustration from Gotham Gazette.