New York City Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) today marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Ida by announcing a suite of stormwater infrastructure initiatives aimed at making the city more resilient to extreme rainfall in the future. As New Yorkers continue to experience the increasing impacts of climate change, the city is accelerating plans for a multi-layered system of adaptive infrastructure that will make New York City more resilient to Ida-level rainstorms, and an implementation plan to guide this long-term effort is underway.

Including in the suite of initiatives announced was a partnership with Dr. Eric Sanderson, Senior Conservation Ecologist at WCS.

Said Sanderson: "The future depends on working with nature, not against it."

From the city news release: “The city has also partnered with Eric Sanderson — a senior conservation ecologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society — for this project. Sanderson is an expert in the natural history of New York City and has written extensively on the buried streams and wetlands across the five boroughs and the correlation of those waterways with chronic flooding conditions today. As part of this partnership, maps will be created that overlay historical wetlands and streams with our current built infrastructure and data on reports of flooding. A public website with these maps is expected to be available to the public in 2023.

Read full release here: https://on.nyc.gov/3B5irMx