Expert Q&A: Dr. Adam Parris

Adam Parris is the Deputy Director of Climate Science and Risk Communication at the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency in New York, where he is responsible for organizing and managing the next New York City Panel on Climate Change  and for bringing the latest science to bear on how New York City responds to and prepares for climate change. Adam is a nationally-recognized leader with 15 years of experience working with scientists, governments, and communities to advance climate resilience and adaptation. He previously he led the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, a partnership aimed at improving resilience in New York City. Adam has supported coastal planning for Federal agencies, as well as the states of California, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey. Mr. Parris also directed NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program, a network of 10 regional centers that help expand the nation’s capacity to prepare for and adapt to climate. He has coedited two books and co-authored nearly a dozen papers both research and nonfiction.

Tell me about the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency. What does it do?

The Mayor’s Office of Resiliency (MOR) strives to adapt New York City to the unprecedented challenge of climate change and create a more resilient, equitable, and vibrant city for future, current and future generations. We do that through science-based analysis, program and project development, and capacity building.

We do our own research and analysis and we sometimes partner with others. We primarily partner with the New York City Panel on Climate Change, but we also partner with other City agencies and with folks outside of government, such as universities. A great example is something we call the Heat Vulnerability Index. MOR staff worked with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and scientists from the New York City Panel on Climate Change to couple data on socioeconomic trends and patterns with data on health and data on climate hazards like extreme heat. That enables us to know not only where things are hottest during a heatwave, for example, but where are the people who have underlying conditions that make them more vulnerable. It is bridging the divide between social, health, and climate data and information.

In terms of program and project development, we’re managing a number of waterfront resiliency projects that were in the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency in the wake of Sandy. We also encourage and help coordinate energy and infrastructure upgrades. For [Leaf Litter readers], it’s important to note that in all of the waterfront work, we look to invest in—or at least analyze the possibility of investing in—natural and nature-based features and ecosystem features for all of the waterfront resiliency projects, wherever possible.

Capacity building work very much aligns with our program development, where we implement things like the “Be A Buddy,” a program, which pairs folks who are vulnerable to extreme heat with friends and neighbors who can check in on each other when there’s an extreme event. We have cooling centers, and we have ways of trying to get people relief and emergency services, but sometimes, people are in situations where they understandably want someone they know to reach out first. This program provides a bit of a human lifeline, someone who can actually help ensure that people are getting the help they need.

When people think of New York City, they may think primarily of the iconic skyline and the 8.5 million people. What are some of the natural, protective systems that still exist in the City?

In my previous position I worked a lot in Jamaica Bay, a huge area in which we have 10,000 acres of parklands (7000 acres are part of the National Park system, and 3000 acres are a part of the New York City Parks system.) Much of that land is in tidal wetlands or intertidal flats. We also have some coastal maritime forests and some beaches and dunes along the Rockaways. All of those systems provide a buffer for the kinds of floods that we encounter on a more regular basis—those we might expect to have a 50% chance of encountering in a given year, or those we would expect to see about 10 to 20 times a year with an exceptional high tide or a small nor’easter. Those systems provide a buffer to flooding, and they provide a service in terms of cooling, as they are not hard surfaces that absorb and radiate heat. That’s where the remaining acres New York City park lands, which are spread throughout the city, are providing a lot of service. Whether it’s the big parks, like Central Park and Prospect Park, or the smaller pocket parks and green spaces that line our streets, those areas provide shade and cooling. They don’t absorb heat the way that skyscrapers and other buildings made of stone or metal do. At night, those buildings reradiate that heat. Consequently, the nighttime temperatures are higher, and that is exactly the time when people are trying to recover from really hot days during a heatwave. When the body cannot recover, that’s what causes a lot of heat stress. So our park lands provide a lot of cooling and relief from the urban heat, and our dunes and wetlands provide a buffer to floodwaters.

How do you analyze the possibility of integrating nature-based solutions? In a place like New York City, that must often involve a big tradeoff in terms of giving up valuable land. How does the city evaluate those potential tradeoffs, and how do you determine, at what point you can cede the right of way to mother nature?

We evaluate the tradeoffs using scientific and engineering analyses. When it comes to a specific project, we do alternatives analyses, and look at the costs and benefits of different alternatives. And we do our best to try to understand some of the less traditional, non-monetary benefits that ecosystems can provide and incorporate, as many of those features as possible.

For example, we just broke ground in the Rockaways on a reinforced dune coupled with beach nourishment and some groins. Rather than a traditional seawall, we’re using a hybrid approach that uses some natural features and some engineered features to provide a level of flood protection that that the folks in the Rockaways need and a higher level of protection than they’ve had.

As far as ceding to mother nature, we live in a very dense and diverse city. As we grapple with future climate change and building a more resilient future, the equity component is very much an immediate and urgent issue. One of the biggest causes of our climate vulnerabilities is racial inequity. We are trying to really focus our attention to the people who face the greatest risks. In many of those communities, we still have a lot of trust building to do, and just saying that “we are going to cede to mother nature” is not necessarily the kind of proposition that would be supported by most residents. We have to engage communities to examine those tradeoffs, make them transparent, and even situate them in the context of other concerns that communities have about crime, gentrification, and education.

The good news is that I think nature and open space can play a big role in that. We know that nature has positive effects on people’s health in terms of managing extreme heat and floodwaters. We also know that nature has positive effects on people’s mental health. Nature can be an additive force in dealing with a range of concerns that we have to manage when we think about climate change—not just the direct climate hazards like flooding and heat, but the indirect impacts. We have to plan for the future in a way that’s better than what people are experiencing today, and provide some economic prosperity and growth that is fair and just.

Can you share an example of a waterfront resilience project in the City that is enhancing (or will enhance) environmental sustainability, economic equality, and social justice?

In the first six years of my career, I worked on ecosystem restoration projects all around the state of California. Restoration happens on such a bigger scale on the west coast. Projects there can be thousands of acres as opposed to tens of acres as they are here in New York City. Here, we really try to figure out how to optimize benefits.

The Living Breakwaters project off the cost of Staten Island is a nice example of optimizing benefits. It will provide flood attenuation, but also some underwater, subtidal and intertidal habitat. At the Rockaways, our project will nourish beaches and provide buffer protection, but it is also a dynamic project that can help maintain a supply of sand that will make its way around Breezy Point and into Jamaica Bay. Even though that beach is not a pristine natural habitat, we are still maintaining some of the natural processes that you would expect along that peninsula. The marsh island restorations in Jamaica Bay are also are great examples of places where we’ve restored habitat largely for habitat sake, but there are two adjacent communities that will receive some flood protection and water quality improvement benefits. It is hard to look at one project and say that it achieves all of the benefits— of flood attenuation, cooling, water quality improvement, habitat, public access, and open space. But when you look at combinations of projects, especially close to each other, like those in Jamaica Bay, you start to see the benefits really add up.

How has COVID impacted progress on the City’s resilience plan and programs?

We have still been able to progress with projects under the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, as they are being funded with support from our federal partners, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and FEMA. Like that’s how we were able to break ground on The Rockaways project, for example. One of the things that COVID is forcing us to do is grapple with something we wanted to do: look across the goals and objectives in OneNYC, and seek ways to manage multiple risks or hazards through integration and bundling of goals and objectives.

New York City Emergency Management has developed a nice framework for convening cross agency dialogue. The intersection of energy, heat, and COVID was something that we saw play out as a very visceral and real experience this past summer. In the spring, we knew people were going to be physically distancing and at home during a period when we would usually encourage them to go to a mall, movie theater, or cooling center when a heatwave would happen. COVID advanced progress through the Home Energy Assistance Program. We were able to get 74,000 air conditioners in the homes of low-income seniors, which is one of the most vulnerable populations when you talk about extreme heat.

We have to look at whether we can continue that program, especially as we hopefully move from managing the pandemic as it’s unfolding to recovering from it. One of the ways we would do that is to continue some of the successful programs we’ve had with respect to open streets and parks, which have been a lifeline. That is one way we can couple goals that we have with respect to expanding access to parks and nature while maintaining the integrity of public open space.

The latest iteration of the City’s resilience strategy OneNYC 2050, was released in 2019. The Action Plan calls for the development of Coastal Protection Design Guidelines by Dec. 31. What is the status of those guidelines?

MOR has made lots of progress. We are working on coastal neighborhood planning guidelines that are based on our lessons learned from our work on waterfront resiliency projects to date. NYC Parks has a document on resilient landscape design and resilient restoration that includes guidance on restoring habitats to anticipate and address future conditions with climate change. NYC Parks High Performance Landscape Guidelines and Design and Planning for Flood Resiliency guidelines. What we’re trying to do is develop the human component of that. We are looking at how that restoration guidance reconciles with the work we’ve done with communities on waterfront resiliency projects. This involved examining the kinds of tradeoffs we discussed earlier. The choices have to deal not only with the natural component of the coastal projects, but the way that the nature and coastal protection fits into the quality of life and fabric of a community.

Our issue features a piece about Dutch Dialogues and Rebuild by Design as catalysts for new ways of thinking about and approaching the protection of coastal cities. Some of the RBD projects are currently underway in NYC. From the City’s perspective, how are those projects going? How are they being received publicly?

A number of the Rebuild by Design projects and processes were useful for coming up with big, inspiring ideas that really captured attention. Designers have an incredible capacity to visualize, so a lot of good materials were developed to help people visualize and comprehend the scope and scale of projects.

Having said that, I think we’re finding that when you start to actually think about how these projects could be installed, for example, how to manage a cost of protection project in and around some of our existing transportation systems or other critical infrastructure, like sewer mains and subway lines and energy transformers, you start to run up against some hard constraints. One of the biggest lessons learned is that it helps to identify those constraints upfront, before you engage communities, so that you don’t create the impression that certain alternatives are feasible. You need to start with alternatives that are feasible and apply some creativity from there, as opposed to starting with a blank canvas, which New York City is not, and then trying to retrofit alternatives.

The City has also implemented projects like restoring wetlands at Sawmill Creek on Staten Island and saltmarsh at Sunset Cove Park in Queens. From the City’s perspective, what are the biggest challenges when it comes to implementing natural and nature-based solutions for shoreline protection? I’m assuming funding is always a challenge. What else?

Well, you hit on a big one. Per acre, restoration in New York City is more expensive than in most places in the U.S. by a longshot. For coastal projects, one of the reasons it is expensive is that it is difficult to get clean sediment. It is the building block for managing elevation and really shaping the site to be what you want it to be, and it’s in short supply. It is also expensive. We also have legacy contamination. We’ve had to deal with that at several different restoration sites, including Sunset Cove The Gowanus Canal, for example, has now become an EPA Superfund site. Managing legacy contaminants is very important, and incredibly expensive and it affects the cost benefit calculus of these restoration projects.

There’s also the challenge of public support and awareness. We live in a dense urban environment, so most restoration projects are not happening in some far-off place; they are in someone’s backyard. It is critical to understand how the restoration projects fit with all of the other goals for a given community and to do strong community engagement to bring people in on formulating goals, developing alternatives, and analyzing alternatives. You need to be open to making design adjustments and reconciling the community priorities with what’s feasible from an ecosystem standpoint. Then you must implement the project on a timely basis. There are all sorts of process challenges all along the way that have real implications for how we build trust and how we ensure that New Yorkers feel like these projects are ones they will steward over the long term.

Looking at your website, it is clear that incorporating diverse perspectives and stakeholder input is integral to your agency’s mission and goals. But we’re talking about an incredibly diverse population of 8.5 million people. I understand that in 2020 the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency began an outreach effort to help guide prioritization of climate research & action (Climate Research Exchange Dialogues). Can you tell me a bit about that? Who is participating and how?

There are a million different climate research needs, and we don’t have a set research agenda or a prioritized sense of what research we need to do first. The city doesn’t have a research and development portfolio. We don’t make grants to science entities. We often have to work with funders to make the case there are certain gaps in our knowledge that may be creating barriers to climate action. We want to make public input a part of how we communicate those gaps to funders and to entities like the New York City Panel on Climate Change.

We want to strengthen the connection between public good and the research that we’re doing on climate. And to do that, we really have to have an active dialog.

That’s what the Climate Research Exchange is. We’re creating an annual process where we will seek public input and bring it directly to bear, alongside input from city agencies, and state and federal partners, in identifying our highest priority knowledge gaps. This helps create a public agenda for climate research, rather than something the City develops behind closed doors.

It is a four-step process. In the first step, we organize discussion groups with any group or community that wants to talk about things they want to know about climate change. The discussion lasts an hour or an hour and a half. We provide information and give a sense of what we know and what we don’t now, and then, we have structured discussion how to address those gaps.

We follow the discussion group with an individual survey, for folks who cannot do the discussion group. This is a chance for individuals to give detailed feedback about their specific sense of what we need to know. Then we’re synthesizing that input alongside input from scientists, including the New York City Panel on Climate Change, to formulate a set of priorities.

The third step is to draft a report of those priorities and loop back with people to give them a sense of what we heard and allow them to provide feedback as an informal kind of vetting. In future years you could imagine a voting process where people can vote on what they think are the highest priorities.

The final step is the release of an annual climate research priorities report. It may not look too different from one year to the next, but at least it’s sort of an annual benchmark of what we’re hearing. We want to keep the process going. We can only reach so many people in any given year, but as people become more aware of this process, we hope to reach wider and wider circles of people and create more diverse means for them to provide input.

In the early spring, we’re looking to release our first report. So far, we have primarily done more engagements with City agencies, but we are earnestly starting to reach out to communities that we feel are most vulnerable and have historically been excluded from resources. In the meantime, if anyone wants to organize a discussion session or wants to talk with us where we’re totally open.

[Note: as of publishing, the MOR had just conducted its first group discussions with communities in Jamaica Bay, with support from the Science and Resilience Institute and Public Agenda.]

Has the pandemic impacted stakeholders’ perspectives on climate change and risk in the City?

I think that one of the biggest impacts that the pandemic has on perspectives of climate change is that is has been another reminder that we’re not facing individual hazards and risks. We’re facing cascading risks, like being physically distant during heat waves, or thinking about where to locate and how to structure shelters if we had a big coastal storm. It’s not like we haven’t had things happen in succession or at the same time before, but this reminder rings true for people and that has shown up a lot in our discussions.

Are you learning anything about stakeholder perspectives on nature-based shoreline protection?

We haven’t yet collected all the perspectives that we want for the first report, but one thing that I can say is consistently showing up is that people feel like the science justifies solutions that use ecosystem services and deliver multiple benefits. If anything, people want to know how we can do more of that, and that is a valid question. In terms of knowledge gaps, what legal and policy research needs to happen to look at the barriers to implementing those kinds of solutions?

We have seen some of those barriers in attempts to use natural and nature-based features with some of the Rebuild by Design projects, where we’re trying things that the existing regulatory system isn’t very well equipped to accommodate. Using current methods for cost, benefit, analysis, and evaluation from a legal standpoint, it is much easier to justify using hard, engineered solutions than nature-based solutions. There is lot of policy, legal, and economic research that I think could really help in that regard.

Any final words of advice for Leaf Litter readers?

The wisest person would tell you that they know nothing. I don’t say that in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. When I began my career, I worked on ecosystem restoration in 2003 in a firm that was one of the first to do it in the San Francisco Bay Area, dating back to the seventies and eighties. I learned a lot of the history of ecological restoration, and I’ve watched a big chunk of its recent history, and I believe restoration professionals have come a long, long way. And yet, I think we have a lot more to learn from people who work in civic engagement. Not just in terms of engaging communities for the sake of restoration projects, but literally engaging communities and understanding their perspectives on quality of life, and what they hope to achieve. Restoration professionals need to be open to formulating and adjusting restoration goals to fit with community goals, and really put racial equity front and center. Think about ways that nature can be a positive force in building racial equity.

In the early spring, we’re looking to release our first report. So far, we have primarily done more engagements with City agencies, but we are earnestly starting to reach out to communities that we feel are most vulnerable and have historically been excluded from resources. In the meantime, if anyone wants to organize a discussion session or wants to talk with us where we’re totally open.

[Note: as of publishing, the MOR had just conducted its first group discussions with communities in Jamaica Bay, with support from the Science and Resilience Institute and Public Agenda.]

Has the pandemic impacted stakeholders’ perspectives on climate change and risk in the City?

I think that one of the biggest impacts that the pandemic has on perspectives of climate change is that is has been another reminder that we’re not facing individual hazards and risks. We’re facing cascading risks, like being physically distant during heat waves, or thinking about where to locate and how to structure shelters if we had a big coastal storm. It’s not like we haven’t had things happen in succession or at the same time before, but this reminder rings true for people and that has shown up a lot in our discussions.

Are you learning anything about stakeholder perspectives on nature-based shoreline protection?

We haven’t yet collected all the perspectives that we want for the first report, but one thing that I can say is consistently showing up is that people feel like the science justifies solutions that use ecosystem services and deliver multiple benefits. If anything, people want to know how we can do more of that, and that is a valid question. In terms of knowledge gaps, what legal and policy research needs to happen to look at the barriers to implementing those kinds of solutions?

We have seen some of those barriers in attempts to use natural and nature-based features with some of the Rebuild by Design projects, where we’re trying things that the existing regulatory system isn’t very well equipped to accommodate. Using current methods for cost, benefit, analysis, and evaluation from a legal standpoint, it is much easier to justify using hard, engineered solutions than nature-based solutions. There is lot of policy, legal, and economic research that I think could really help in that regard.

Any final words of advice for Leaf Litter readers?

The wisest person would tell you that they know nothing. I don’t say that in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. When I began my career, I worked on ecosystem restoration in 2003 in a firm that was one of the first to do it in the San Francisco Bay Area, dating back to the seventies and eighties. I learned a lot of the history of ecological restoration, and I’ve watched a big chunk of its recent history, and I believe restoration professionals have come a long, long way. And yet, I think we have a lot more to learn from people who work in civic engagement. Not just in terms of engaging communities for the sake of restoration projects, but literally engaging communities and understanding their perspectives on quality of life, and what they hope to achieve. Restoration professionals need to be open to formulating and adjusting restoration goals to fit with community goals, and really put racial equity front and center. Think about ways that nature can be a positive force in building racial equity