Cynthia Rosenzweig, who heads the Climate Impacts Group at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University, presented a study to leaders from those neighborhoods describing how to lower the temperature and reduce energy demand. The results ranked the effectiveness of specific strategies for certain areas, one of which was theirs – “Lower Manhattan East.”
The presentation last week to a subgroup of Community Board 3 had a broad purpose: to initiate a partnership between the scientific community and local leaders. The goal is to bring scientific tools to bear on community-based green initiatives – as a way to do green design on a neighborhood scale and to measure and monitor its effectiveness.
Green is shorthand for sustainable, which means development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. That's the definition a United Nations commission coined in 1987, the same definition used today in Mayor Bloomberg's future-shaping PlaNYC 2030.
“Green is a loose term that encompasses not only care and preservation of the earth's environment, but equity and social issues as well,” says Rosenzweig. Implementing green design on a neighborhood scale has the potential to be more effective than the building-by-building approach, she says, pointing to the Lower Manhattan East case study as evidence.
The study of this area was the first time these researchers integrated their climate and energy data and models to analyze information gathered during three heat waves in the summer of 2002. The study found that planting trees, increasing the reflectivity of roads and sidewalks, and putting vegetation on roofs could lower the temperature of the study area by one degree. This is significant because New York City’s summertime temperature is an average of 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than surrounding suburban areas, and climate change is projected to increase that.
The group doing the study formed a loose coalition called New York City Urban Modeling Consortium, including stakeholders like Con Edison and the Environmental Protection Agency, along with academics from local research institutions. Con Edison’s 14th Street power station and Community Board 3’s (CB3) current commitment to environmental planning were two factors that drew the researchers to the neighborhood.
In 2002, Con Edison agreed to a $3.75 million settlement to CB3 and environmental groups to support projects that would mitigate the adverse impacts of expanding the 14th Street facility. CB3 established the Con Edison Environmental Settlement Fund Subcommittee to oversee and allocate the funds used for clean air initiatives.
In June, the Board directed some of that money toward a program called “Greening a Block,” which will employ local residents to retrofit residential units with green technologies. After the presentation, Damaris Reyes, executive director of the housing advocacy organization Good Old Lower East Side, Inc., said the study validated the need for the "Greening" project, which her organization will be managing.
Going forward, the district will have the potential to explore even more ambitious projects. “We’re trying to use these models to show what’s potentially achievable,” said Ed Linky, a senior energy advisor from the Environmental Protection Agency's regional office and a member of the consortium.
