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| Rendering of a proposed levee at South Beach included in the mayor's presentation. |
On Tuesday, the Bloomberg administration released its long-awaited resiliency plan to shape up a city that will see a quarter of its land become floodplain in the next 40 years.
The city had a comparatively early start on climate planning--in 2007, it came out with PlaNYC, a set of recommendations to deal with population growth and climate change over the following 23 years. But as climate projections became increasingly severe, the city's badly outdated, 100-year-old flood maps largely stayed the same. And then Sandy hit, wrecking the city in an unprecedented natural disaster.
The next New York City mayor will adopt an ongoing crisis. The New York City Panel on Climate Change estimates that sea levels will rise two-and-a-half feet by midcentury, along with increasing frequency of Frankenstein storms like Sandy--which is estimated to cost the city as much as $90 billion by 2050. Here's a quick set of highlights out of the new game plan, along with how they'll change our built environment over the next several decades.
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