Project Team: Timon McPhearson, Loan Diep, Chris Kennedy, Natalie Pierson, Arysha Gupta

GoGreenNext is an EU funded Horizon Europe project with the ambition of supporting cities and regions to achieve their climate targets by implementing novel nature-based approaches. For this effort, the Urban Systems Lab team is developing a digital ‘serious game’ to serve as an educational tool for communicating climate change impacts, urban resilience concepts, where the player(s) get to understand decision-making in urban planning by interacting with Nature-Based Solutions (NBS). The game mechanics will be inspired by the labs multiplayer board game Ekos.

The project is co-funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe research framework under grant agreement no. 101137209 and led by a team at Maynooth University.

ClimateIQ Dashboard Prototype

Project Team: Dr. Timon McPhearson, Daniel Sauter, Dr. Ahmed Mustafa, Christopher Kennedy, Dr. Luis Ortiz, Dr. Madhavi Jain, Anna Kramer, Dr. Sally El Hajjar, Shammunul Islam, Eric Bonner, Rajan Jain with partners listed below.

ClimateIQ is an AI-driven climate hazard assessment tool leveraging Machine Learning, Big Data, and multiple climate hazard model environments to reveal high resolution hotspots of overlapping climate risks in cities and urbanized regions.

The aim of the tool is to help city planners and communities prioritize local adaptations to climate hazards, using advanced climate models and machine learning to identify the areas most at risk.

Our Approach:

ClimateIQ is based on an innovative, integrated multi-hazard modeling environment, which generates predictions for high resolution urban heat and extreme flood hazard exposure information. ClimateIQ uses advanced physics-based models to simulate climate hazard exposure. Machine learning models learn to reproduce the outputs of the physics-based models, speeding up climate hazard simulation time. To make hazard information available to users, ClimateIQ partners with Climasens to provide a user-friendly dashboard and APIs for easy integration into existing workflows.

Team:

The ClimateIQ team brings extensive experience in climate risk modeling, AI applications, data analysis and visualization, as well as working with diverse stakeholders in cities. Led by Dr. Timon McPhearson, Director of the Urban Systems Lab (USL) at the New School in New York City, the core team includes faculty and researchers at The New School, along with partners at Climasens, Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC), Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and George Mason University. Support provided in part by Google.org Impact Challenge on Climate Innovation.

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City of Atlanta Power Infrastructure

City of New York Synthetic Power Infrastructure

Project Team: Timon McPhearson, Ahmed Mustafa, Mikhail Chester, David Iwaniec, Rajan Jain, Ryan Sparks, Ryan Hoff and others

This initiative brings together researchers at the Urban Systems Lab, Arizona State University (ASU) and Georgia State University (GSU) to co-develop synthetic infrastructure models for Phoenix, New York City and Atlanta that will simulate critical failure in energy distribution systems and potential cascading impacts on other power, water, and transportation infrastructure during extreme events to optimize solutions, and improve reliability and robustness.

The custom coded synthetic infrastructure modeling environment (SyNF model) links multiple data sources to ultimately generate new synthetic energy network data that attempts to mimic real-world energy networks and therefore not only fills energy network data gaps, but provides the novel ability to examine failure scenarios and their cascading impacts to other energy dependent infrastructure networks.

The effort will seek to answer the following research questions:

• How can new and emerging data and modeling approaches, such as synthetic infrastructure modeling, be used to diagnose energy system vulnerabilities, reveal potential for cascading failure that impacts energy and connected power, water, and transportation infrastructure?

• Additionally, how vulnerable are critical energy infrastructure components from internal or external disruptions such as extreme weather and climate? How can these new modeling approaches generate new knowledge to drive development of more adaptive urban energy infrastructure design?

Download Final Report Executive Summary

Support provided by the Sloan Foundation.

Project Team: Colleagues from The New School (Drs. Timon McPhearson and Joel Towers), Columbia University, Cornell University, City University of New York, Drexel University, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, NASA/GISS, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Population Council, Sarah Lawrence College, Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay (SRIJB), Stevens Institute of Technology, Arcadis, and USDA Forest Service, as well as input from NYC interagency collaborators.

The Town+Gown: Climate Vulnerability, Impact, and Adaptation Analysis (VIA) project is co-led by Professors Joel Towers and Dr. Timon McPhearson at The New School to carry out a $2.5M study on future climate change and its potential impacts to inform decision-making by the City of New York and assessment reports by the NYC Panel on Climate Change and the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (MOCEJ).

The team includes scientists from nine academic institutions (The New School, Columbia University, Cornell University, City University of New York, Drexel University, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Sarah Lawrence College, Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, and Stevens Institute of Technology), four governmental institutions and nonprofit organizations (Natural Resources Defense Council, Population Council, NASA/GISS, and USDA Forest Service) and from the private sector (Arcadis). Together, this team will work collaboratively to develop a comprehensive analysis of future potential climate conditions and associated socio-economic impacts in New York City. Specifically, the team will:

• Develop climate projections for the NYC region, including high resolution heat risk and exposure projections, storm surge risk analysis, and coastal flood mapping,

• Characterize current and future extreme heavy rainfall in New York City,

• Conduct a systematic assessment of health-related economic costs from climate-sensitive events in New York City, and

• Create a Coastal Flooding Vulnerability Index for New York City

Final Report: NYC Climate Vulnerability, Impact, and Adaptation Analysis (VIA)

This report assesses future climate change and its potential impacts, to inform decision-making by the City of New York. The findings draw from an 18-month study conducted by an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Professors Joel Towers and Dr. Timon McPhearson at The New School’s Tishman Environment and Design Center and Urban Systems Lab commissioned by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice (MOCEJ) through a Town+Gown partnership program. Read Report

Support provided by the City of New York.

Ocellus XR is a mixed reality application that leverages the Urban Systems Lab’s (USL) Data Visualization Platform to present users with unique interactive geospatial information of heat, flood risk and other climate indicators in New York City. Integrating environmental studies and data visualization into place-based research on social vulnerability and equity, the app provides a novel experience to understand climate risk, allowing users to explore first-person 3D visualizations of social, ecological, and technological data by projecting interactive maps and implemented resilience interventions onto physical surfaces and experiment with augmented reality layers. The Ocellus XR project builds on the USL’s expertise in advancing spatial agent-based modeling, machine learning, social media data, and cutting-edge visualization of urban social, ecological, and infrastructure systems to ask new questions about key climate change risks and opportunities to advance adaptation in cities.

Acknowledgements

Ocellus XR is developed by members of the Urban Systems Lab at The New School. The current Ocellus XR team includes Urban Systems Lab associate diretor Daniel Sauter; USL director Timon McPhearson; Joe Steele, MS Data Visualization ’18; Xinyue Elena Peng, BFA Design & Technology ’22; and Schools of Public Engagement research fellow Claudia Tomateo; and Urban Systems Lab Associate Director Chris Kennedy. Support for OcellusXR is provided in part by the Architecture League of New York’s 2022 Independent Project Grant which is made possible through support from the New York State Council on the Arts.

The graphics, text and information included in the “What can I do?” section of Ocellus XR was developed by WE ACT for Environmental Justice, the East Harlem COAD and Harlem Emergency Network as part of the Climate Ready Uptown Plan (CRUP) project. CRUP is a physical pamphlet that helps Northern Manhattan community members understand their individual risk to climate related disasters and provides pertinent information to help prepare themselves and their families.

Project Team: Erik Andersson, Timon McPhearson, Daniel Sauter

SMARTer Greener Cities aims to develop and test novel tools and processes for explicitly converging social, ecological, and technological approaches. The convergence of these approaches will promote resilient and equitable urban futures in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, and generate new opportunities for transformative change and increasing resilience to extreme events in other Nordic cities. The comprehensive integration of emerging science and practice connected to each of the three couplings (social-ecological (S-E), ecological-technological (E-T), and social-technological (S-T)) into a combined SETS framework is essential for the development of “smarter” (through systems) solutions for resilience and equity. We believe, despite the challenge of systems oriented research and practice, that we must cut across silos in disciplines, approaches, and knowledge systems by bringing technology, people, and nature together.

AI, People & Planet is a research initiative hosted by the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Princeton Institute for International Regional and Studies at Princeton University, The Urban Systems Lab at The New School and, the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.

The USL is exploring advances in urban data science, availability of real-time data, advanced spatial modeling, machine learning, cloud-based GPU processing, and cutting-edge visualization of urban social and infrastructure systems to ask new questions to be asked about key climate change risks and opportunities to advance adaptation in cities. Our interdisciplinary team includes scientists, planners, NGOs, industry, and other stakeholders working around the world to plan and envision positive urban futures, assessing heat and flood risk, and analyzing nature-based solutions and other strategies for building SETS resilience in cities.