This website was developed by the students of a Macaulay Honors College Seminar at Brooklyn College for a class on Adaptation to Climate Change. In class, we examined the interconnectedness of global and local scales to analyze the environmental impacts of climate change. This website represents the students effort to document present adaptation efforts to Climate Change in New York City. The anchor to this effort was a report titled “Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response” that was issued in 2010 and can be found through the PlaNYC2030 website.

This was a meaningful time to explore adaptation to climate change because super- storm Sandy ravaged New York City–along with much of the Northeast and the Caribbean–halfway through the semester. This was a powerful reminder that climate change affects us every day, disrupting our lives and forcing us to ponder the human causes of such natural disasters.

In addition to exploring the scientific and technical aspects of adaptation to climate change and summarizing the relation between frequency and intensity of extreme events and predictions of climate change, we analyzed environmental justice implications of climate change. Special emphasis was directed at the determination of people and infrastructural vulnerabilities to the impacts as well as steps that can be taken to reduce vulnerabilities. We hope this website shares some information about the ways that institutions are adapting to climate change and seeking to mitigate its effects on people.