Educating with resilience in mind: Addressing climate change in post-Sandy New York City

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Table 1. Resilience definitions from the academic literature.

Type of Resilience	Definition
Community	The ability of communities to cope with and recover from external stressors resulting from social, political and environmental change (CARRI, 2013)
Ecological	The magnitude of disturbance that a system can experience before it moves into a different state with different controls on structure and function (Holling, 1973)
Engineering	Rate at which a system approaches steady state following a perturbation (Holling, 1996)
Psychological	The processes of, capacity for, or patterns of positive adaptation during or following exposure to adverse experiences that have the potential to disrupt or destroy the successful functioning or development of the person (Masten & Obradovic, 2008)
Social-Ecological Systems (SES)	The capacity of a social-ecological system to continually change, adapt, or transform so as to maintain ongoing processes in response to gradual and small-scale change, or transform in the face of devastating change (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003)

Table 2. Example program content and organizational changes in NYC environmental education and stewardship organizations after Hurricane Sandy.

Changes in Program Content
Reinforce Existing Content
Green Map, which engages people in participatory mapping of environmental features, created maps showing Hurricane Sandy high water lines and damage in NYC, and conducted bike tours of Sandy-impacted sections of lower Manhattan.
Queens Botanical Garden, which prior to the storm taught third graders about energy, adapted their lessons to incorporate the children's personal experience of losing power and awareness of how their power was produced and transported. Similarly, this organization adapted its wetlands lessons to use Sandy as an example of the importance of planning for wetlands and for water and sewer management.
Trees New York used their network of citizen pruners to gather data about tree health to report to city contractors engaged in forest restoration, and advocated for use of structural pruning as a way to limit tree damage during severe weather events.
Stewardship/Restoration Activities
Breezy Point Land Management Committee conducted volunteer dune restoration projects along the heavily-impacted Breezy Point beaches.
Lower East Side Ecology Center conducted tree planting activities to replace damaged or lost trees and created a large bioswale.
Rockaway Waterfront Alliance engaged youth in mapping and dune stewardship to support the development of soft-infrastructure coastal protection in Rockaway.
Resilience
GrowNYC developed the “Resilient NYC Community Garden Guide” to help community gardens recover from the storm, with suggestions encompassing preventive pruning, green infrastructure design and construction, permeable paving, bioswales and rain gardens, plant selection, storm resistant structures, and storm planning.
Rockaway Waterfront Alliance created an environmental resilience curriculum for their environmental education school workshops.
Hudson River Park Trust sought out collaborations with resilience scholars and tried to obtain funding to build additional artificial oyster reefs to reduce wave action.
Governor's Island Harbor School considered replacing sustainability with resilience in their curriculum.
Uprose established Sunset Park Climate Justice and Community Resiliency Center, possibly the first grassroots-led, climate adaptation and community resiliency planning project in the city.
Other New Content/Activities
Rockaway Waterfront Alliance partnered with a local artist and schools to create the Sea-Song Memorial, a driftwood sculpture that serves as a “metaphor for the strength of community and cooperation.”
Solar One's community solar program supports the development of cooperatives to leverage community buying power to purchase solar panels.
Organizational Changes
Reinforce or advocate for existing message
Trust for Public Land NYC Playgrounds Project used Sandy as an example during community design sessions to drive home the message of the need for green infrastructure in NYC neighborhoods.
The River Project used Hurricane Sandy to emphasize the role of shallows and reefs in the health and resilience of the NYC harbor and its estuary.
Engage New Audiences
Liberty Science Center used their Global Microscope to transmit an electronic field trip about Hurricane Sandy to students in China, using NOAA and NASA data to create a three-dimensional mapping visualization of the storm surge.
New Partnerships
Hudson River Park Trust, whose extensive network of green space along the Hudson River was heavily impacted by the hurricane, engaged in new partnerships to seek funding for green infrastructure projects, including using living shorelines and oyster reefs as coastal barriers.
Engage New Volunteers
Clean Ocean Action developed Waves of Action for the Shore, which engaged nearly 14,000 volunteers in cleaning up marine and storm debris in over 100 communities in NY and NJ.
Hudson River Park Trust strove to accommodate an overwhelming influx of volunteers from within and outside the city in the first several months after the storm.
Obtain Funding
The Battery Park Conservancy, which is home to Battery Urban Farm, received a federal Rebuild by Design grant, through which they will construct a series of swales and berms that will be integrated into Battery Park, and will protect a newly designed farm. Battery Urban Farm also conducted a crowd-sourced funding campaign through Indiegogo, and raised $16,077 to repair and replace items damaged or lost in the storm.

CARRI. (2013). Definitions of community resilience: An analysis. Washington DC: Community and Regional Resilience Institute.

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Holling, C. S. (1996). Engineering resilience versus ecological resilience. In P. C. Schultze, R. A. Frosch, & P. G. Risser (Eds.), Engineering within ecological constraints (pp. 31–44). Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences.

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Masten, A. S., & Obradovic, J. (2008). Disaster preparation and recovery: Lessons from research on resilience in human development. Ecology and Society, 13, 9.

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Berkes, F., Colding, J., & Folke, C. (2003). Navigating social-ecological systems: Building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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