Urban Policy & Planning

The New Urban Agenda

USL Director Timon McPhearson participated in the UN Habitat III meeting in Quito, Ecuador. Held every 20 years, this multilateral meeting adopted a global framework for making cities more sustainable — the New Urban Agenda (NUA). In an article in Nature, McPhearson and colleagues identified 5 key steps to boost the development and impact of urban science, which have been echoed in numerous publications since and provided the foundation for the launch of the Future Earth Urban Knowledge Action Network (Urban KAN) at Habitat III.  The five key steps for urban science include:

1. Form a global urban scientific body.

2. Spread knowledge and institutions globally.

3. Spread knowledge and institutions globally.

4. Support transdisciplinary research and synthesis. 

5. Improve access to science-policy arenas.

Read more about this work in The Guardian (here and here), The Nature of Cities, This is Place, Reuters, CityLab.

NYC DEP and MOR Stormwater Resiliency

The USL is working with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection and MOR Stormwater Resiliency to improve decision-making for investments to reduce flood risk and build resilience to combined challenges of extreme precipitation and coastal storms and storm surge.

Advisory Work for NAC, MTNYC, and MOR UHI Task Force, and NPCC

As a contributing author to the 2019 New York City Panel on Climate Change, USL Fellow Luis Ortiz, wrote the report’s section on extreme temperature projections, updating the methods used in the previous report. He also contributed spatially explicit projections of heatwave metrics derived from state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction system that included the effects of buildings on NYC’s microclimate.

• NCCP Report: Advancing Tools and Methods for Flexible Adaptation Pathways and Science Policy Integration

• Cool Neighborhoods NYC: A Comprehensive Approach to Keep Communities Safe in Extreme Heat