Coproducing climate risk data to improve urban adaptation and resilience decision-making

We live on an urban planet, one that will become even more urban in coming decades. The polycrisis of biodiversity loss and climate change is interacting dynamically with urbanization creating a locus of impact both by, and on, cities and urbanized regions.  Cities concentrate people, economic activity, and infrastructure creating risk that when climate fueled extreme weather events occur, viscerally showcase the impacts of climate change in dramatic and damaging ways. With climate change continuing to accelerate, and impacts on cities likely to accelerate as well, adapting cities to an Anthropocene climate will require aggressive upscaling in adaptation solutions, finance, and political will. What scientific information do cities need to effectively prioritize adaptation and resilience solutions to protect residents, critical infrastructure, and their economies?  New York City provides a case study in how co-producing actionable climate science with decision-makers can improve data driven approaches to protect vulnerable residents and build resilience to an increasingly uncertain future.  The NYC Stormwater Resiliency Study and NYC Vulnerability, Impacts, and Adaptation cases will serve as a backdrop to discuss both how coproduction improves research outcomes, and examples of advances in urban flood scenario modeling and vulnerability assessment.

However, NYC is well resourced in ways that most other cities are not, especially in the Global South. How can we scale up climate risk information for less resourced cities to have access to similar actionable and cutting-edge science to prioritize investments, develop resilience plans, and unlock finance for the urban adaptation likely needed under current climate trajectories? ClimateIQ, a new climate AI project funded by Google.org will be presented that seeks to advance data science, large scale data integration, and machine learning to scale operational current and future climate risk data for urban areas  across multiple climate hazards.

About the lecturer

Timon McPhearson is Professor of Urban Ecology at the New School, and Founder and Director of the Urban Systems Lab. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was a Lead Author for the IPCC AR6 report, a Contributing Author to IPBES, and an inaugural member of the World Economic Forum Global Commission on BiodiverCities. In 2020 he was named an NYC Climate Hero by the NYC Department of Transportation and Human Impacts Institute and appointed by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to the NYC Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) in 2020. In 2020, McPhearson was awarded the 2022 Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity as a member of the IPCC and IPBES. In 2019 he was awarded the Sustainability Science Award and the Innovation in Sustainability Science Award by the Ecological Society of America and again awarded the Sustainability Science Award in 2023. His research takes an interdisciplinary systems approach to advancing urban climate change adaptation, environmental justice, and resilience and is published widely in peer-reviewed journals including in Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, and others. He is currently editing a Special Feature for PNAS alongside. His edited books Urban Planet(2018) and Resilient Urban Futures (2021) are widely read and his new book Nature-based Solutions for Cities was published in 2023.