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.
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.
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 disparities, for example, pollution-attributable emergency department visits. Disadvantaged areas also have greater exposure to emissions from heavy-duty diesel vehicles due to their proximity to arterial highways and commercial waste routes and greater exposure to flooding due to coastal storm surges, chronic tidal flooding, and extreme rainfall.
“Prevalent and persistent environmental inequities in New York City create profound economic, social, and health disparities among affected communities,” the report reads. “Achieving environmental justice will require that all New Yorkers have the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making to have a healthy environment to live, learn, and work.”
4 Comments
Bureaucrats will make an unusable worthless map, charge a billion dollars and say you are welcome. In the 1950s they knew how to build.
Americans have become so soft. Try living in a country where it is 90 degrees year round. Where they still have smog and dirty water. Heat and pollution aren’t a problem in NYC. Crime, corruption, drugs and deindustrialization and post-design culture are.
Does "They knew how to build" mean they destroyed poor residential neighborhoods, mostly communities of Black and immigrant families, to build highways serving white people, who lived in suburbs whose construction destroyed agricultural or natural land, driving cars that were fueled by extracted natural products from poor countries populated by brown people who were left with toxic waste and destruction, and thus plundered and ruined the climate on the only habitable planet that exists? Then yes, they did.
This is a good boilerplate of conventional academic misanthropy going around. Unfortunately it’s wrong. Great migrants in the 1920-70 era were lucky to find expanding cities in the North, where wealthy WASPs were leaving behind middle class housing, and building some good public housing and some bad. America is a big place with a lot of natural resources. In reality climate change didn’t start ticking up until globalization in the 70s — when China, SE Asia, India, South America started to pump diesel and coal into the atmosphere. And then drugs hit inner cities, thanks to your usual open borders DC elites on all sides.
Speaking of boilerplate.
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.