New York Failures in The Wake of Climate Disaster
A New York City subway sign warns of a service delay affecting twelve subway lines after a 2023 storm. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
New York City was inundated with extreme weather this summer: twice with flash flooding that dropped 2 inches of rain in one hour and twice with heat waves that laid a blanket of humidity upon the city. On July 14th, thousands of New Yorkers were left stranded when copious amounts of rain overwhelmed the city’s subway system, flooding various stations and even a few subway cars. The delays continued for the days that followed; power outages due to extreme heat affected six lines. Later in the month, power outages hit twice in one week, once again leading to hours-long delays across the city. The subway system's failure revealed the city’s inefficiency and inability to properly adapt to changing and extreme weather conditions, which are expected to become frequent occurrences. In 2020, the city was reclassified as a humid subtropical region, characterized by mild winters and hot summers. The rest of New York and neighboring Northeastern states remain classified as humid continental regions—a categorization that typically features traditional four-season weather. Scientists have long been sounding the alarms about the impending consequences of global warming, and New York City hoped to champion mitigation and adaptation efforts with ambitious goals. Global warming, however, is far outpacing the city’s efforts. NYC has maintained an environmentally progressive facade for over a decade—one that is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold as climate change bangs harder on New Yorkers’ front doors.
In 2007, Mayor Michael Bloomberg established PlaNYC, a sustainability plan that laid out New York City’s climate goals. While it provided a direction to thrive towards, PlaNYC fell short on over half of its goals, and Hurricane Sandy exposed the city’s ill-preparedness to climate disasters when it devastated all five boroughs in 2012. Mayor Bill de Blasio reshaped PlaNYC into OneNYC when he took office, but the timing of implementing goals lagged by years. When Mayor Eric Adams came into office in 2022, he quickly reconfigured the city’s climate experts into the Mayor's Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, which then set forth multiple commitments to combat the changing climate, much like previous administrations. Three of those commitments, focusing on clean energy, energy storage, and solar power, were set to be completed by 2025. None of them has been met, nor are they close to being met.
The following year, the Adams administration, alongside the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, established the Bureau of Coastal Resilience. New York City is surrounded by 520 miles of shoreline, and the goal of the Bureau was to oversee all of its coastal infrastructure projects. Two years later, there are five billion dollars worth of projects to manage, and the bureau has a full-time staff of only seven individuals. If split evenly amongst the staff members, each person would be handling approximately $715 million in infrastructure projects. Regardless of vocalized goals, the city has failed on a more fundamental level—New York is not keeping up with the required energy grid expansion needed to make the switch to renewable energy. This lack of prioritization has slowed renewable projects and persists in undermining the feasibility of any goals, let alone ambitious ones.
The inconsistency between the stated environmental goals of the Adams administration versus the application of those goals lies in the lack of environmental policy prioritization, which has led to an insufficient allocation of city funds towards climate projects. While Adams created the NYC Climate Budget in 2024 to specify monetary allocations towards climate mitigation and adaptation, specific projects of the city's climate budgeting that were expected to be listed within Adams’s executive budget were conspicuously missing. Adam’s executive budget, proposed for the fiscal year of 2026, had little allotment for major mitigation and adaptation efforts, like green infrastructure, citywide electrification, and decarbonization, that can work to protect New Yorkers and the environment. It did, however, have $140 million allocated to the reconstruction of the Brooklyn Marine Terminal and expansion of the public waterfront area near Hunts Point Market. While these investments will surely have an economic return, the lack of climate projects proposed in the report overlooks the need to address the city’s infrastructure with an understanding and acceptance that climate mitigation will not be lucrative for the government.
In response to the Mayor’s proposed budget, the New York City Council urged the Administration to allocate far more towards environmental infrastructure and government agencies that head climate projects, like the Bureau of Coastal Resiliency. The 2026 budget that the Council approved has approximately five million allocated towards targeted local environmental programs, where each council member apportioned $100,000 for the programs they believe would benefit their district the best. The initiative, titled A Greener NYC, was championed by the City Council. While it is comforting to know that there is a component of New York City’s government that remains committed to combating climate change, it does not negate the manipulative plays of the Adams Administration. Holding press conferences to announce new and ambitious climate goals does not mean that previous climate goals have been met. New York City Mayors can create and reconfigure as many environmental agencies as they would like, but without adequate funding and prioritized support, the organizations will remain incapable of change, and New Yorkers will continue to face the brunt of increasingly extreme weather patterns and their long-term consequences.
While dozens of cities around the world are attempting to combat the climate crisis, there are little to none that function within a strongly polluting country that are on track to meet their climate goals. Toronto is an example of a city making stronger strides towards its aim of reducing emissions, having surpassed its 2020 target for greenhouse gas reduction, but it still joins the many other cities, including New York, struggling to stay on track for their 2030 and 2050 goals. Creating climate action goals attached to timelines works to emphasize the necessity of taking measures now. It gives the general public a beacon of hope that those in power are doing what they can with what they have. The inability to meet those goals reveals the ever-growing gap between intention and implementation.
New York City is not a one-off failure. It exists within a system incapable of change because the consequences are looming in our periphery. The world might only catch up when disasters are inescapable. New Yorkers cannot wait that long—the facade of mitigation and adaptation leadership has collapsed. The government of New York City must recognize the consequences of putting economic growth over the environment and its constituents' well-being. The current route has proven itself to be unsustainable, and politicians must learn that lesson before more New Yorkers become victims of the climate crisis.
Elle Sumarokov (GS ‘27) is a junior at the School of General Studies studying political science.