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New York releases city’s first study on environmental justice

2024-04-09T11:41:00-04:00

The New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice has released the city’s first report into environmental justice issues.

Titled 'EJNYC: A Study of Environmental Justice Issues in New York City,' the study analyzes environmental hazards ranging from toxin exposure and summer heat vulnerability to flood risks and transit access.

Image courtesy: Buro Happold

Developed by a team led by Buro Happold and urban design nonprofit Hester Street, the report feeds into a wider project known as the Environmental Justice NYC (EJNYC) initiative, which will develop a city-wide environmental justice strategy. The report is also accompanied by a mapping tool that allows users to visualize environmental issues in their neighborhood.

Image courtesy: Buro Happold

The report found that disadvantaged areas in the city are subject to more stationary sources of pollution, including power plants, waste processing facilities, and waste generators, and contain more observed health dispariti...

New York City selects team to design a report and public portal for tracking environmental injustices

2022-07-18T16:32:00-04:00

Buro Happold and urban design nonprofit Hester Street have announced a partnership with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice to establish an environmental justice report and online data portal that will identify the locations across the city where policies, infrastructure, and investments contribute to inequities in vulnerability and risk from environmental hazards.

The report, coined the Environmental Justice for All Report, and web portal will be accessible to the public and inform the creation of a comprehensive environmental justice plan. The initiative will outline areas of focus for promoting environmental justice in New York City and analyze existing policies, programs, and procedures across the city.

The creation of the report and portal is the result of Local Laws 60 and 64, environmental justice legislation passed by the City Council and signed by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017. Local Law 60 requires that a citywide study of environme...

Meet the first class of Harvard Climate Justice Design Fellows

2022-05-24T11:02:00-04:00

Harvard University has today announced its first-ever cohort for the brand new Climate Justice Design Fellowship, recognizing young leaders across the country in the fields of environmental justice advocacy, law, and climate organizing.

The first class of fellows consists of seven members, primarily from the non-profit sector. Each fellow will be tasked with pursuing data-oriented tools (e.g., the First Street Foundation’s new wildfire risk map) to aid their individual communities’ strides toward environmental justice.

The fellowships are funded through Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and are pilot programs of the broader Harvard-Google Data+Climate Initiative that incorporates proprietary innovations like Google Data Commons and the data visualization service Glue to further empower both scholars and engineers to fight challenges related to climate change.

The progress of the fellowship can be followed online on both Twitter and Instagram. Scroll down to...

New study predicts that Black communities will be disproportionately impacted by climate change-induced flooding by 2050

2022-02-02T15:11:00-05:00

Black communities will be disproportionately saddled with billions of dollars of losses because of climate change as flooding risks grow in the coming decades, according to research published Monday.

According to U.S. and U.K.-based researchers in a new study within the journal Nature Climate Change, not only will the annual cost of flooding across the U.S. reach $40 billion by 2050, but predominantly Black communities will be the most impacted. The findings were obtained by modeling flood risk through 2050 and mapping this over recent census data focused on race and poverty.

With clear linkages between levels of climate risk and race in the U.S., the study found that by 2050, the top 20 percent of proportionally Black census tracts will have twice the flood risk as the 20 percent of areas with the lowest proportion of Black residents.

Architecture schools continue to join the fight against climate change

2020-11-02T15:43:00-05:00

Previously on Archinect, we reported the announcement of three architecture schools pledging climate action. Since then, two more schools of architecture have joined. On October 30th, US Architects Declare confirmed that Woodbury School of Architecture and the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee SARUP have become the latest schools to join.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by US Architects Declare (@architectsdeclare_us) on Oct 30, 2020 at 12:33pm PDT

Now at 329 signatures, US Architects Declare continues to spread the movement and encourage "all built-environment/construction-industry" professionals and students to join.

To expand on climate action and bring forward the work of organizations and individuals leading the charge against climate change, don't miss Archinect's two-part series Architects take Climate Action! For this series, architect and writer Hannah Wood features interviews with architecture activist groups established since 2016, practit...