In the Age of Climate Change, A Nonprofit Tucked Away on Governors Island May Be Our Saving Grace
A North Atlantic storm two times as strong as Hurricane Sandy crashes on New York City’s shores, flooding miles of concrete, spilling into basement apartments across the five boroughs and leaving hundreds—maybe thousands—without power or shelter. Environmental scientists like Kevin Reed of Stony Brook University say this hypothetical scenario is a real possibility that coastal cities like New York need to prepare for as climate change accelerates worldwide.
The New York Climate Exchange, “a first-of-its kind international center for confronting urban climate solutions and issues of environmental justice”, is working to predict and mitigate the destruction of these future storms. On Friday, Oct. 25, the Exchange announced the winner of their AI Urban Stormwater Innovation Challenge, which called on students from participating universities to submit proposals for adaptive flood solutions in urban areas.
The winning proposal outlined a prototype for real-time flood management using social media posts and traffic camera data, which would allow city officials and emergency relief teams to respond quickly to the hardest-hit areas during a flood or extreme weather event.
The Georgia Tech HydroHeroes team presents their winning proposal during the final round of judging for the AI Innovation Challenge, hosted at Pace University. Credit: Kavya Venkateswaran
“This adaptive solution would be easy to implement in many cities because it uses pre-existing technology,” said Kavya Vekateswaran, a member of the “HydroHeroes” team behind the project.
The group of five Georgia Tech students, a mixture of computer science and environmental engineering master’s candidates, worked closely with the Exchange’s technology partner IBM and their watsonx AI tool to develop a language learning model that would process publicly-available data, allowing emergency teams to address areas with the most need.
Tucked away on Governors Island’s 172-acres, in the shadow of lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers,,sits The New York Climate Exchange which operates on $700 million dollars in public and private funding, allowing it to spearhead these innovative projects.
Owned by the federal government who used it as a Coast Guard facility until turning the final acres over to the city in 2003, Governors Island has become a hub for climate progress. In 2021, the city and The Trust For Governors Island announced an open competition seeking a research institution and a climate-focused organization to submit joint proposals for a research and educational hub on the Island. In 2023, the city announced The New York Climate Exchange’s winning proposal with Stony Brook University as its anchor institution.
“[The Exchange] is a new approach to partnerships across commercial, academic, and community sectors that are focused on bringing everybody to the table to have important discussion around climate solutions that are needed in New York,” says Kevin Reed, provost for Climate and Sustainability Planning at Stony Brook University. Reed is also the chief climate scientist and interim director of programming at the Exchange, helping support student-led climate solutions projects on the island.
The Exchange doesn’t yet have a bricks-and-mortar location, but construction for their sustainable campus on Governors Island will begin in 2025. The plans for the Exchange’s academic and research facilities on the island will include the restoration of 70+ year-old historical structures and development of new storm-resistant, sustainable buildings. They will operate largely on solar power and have a zero net energy goal, and create thousands of new green jobs as part of Mayor Eric Adams’ Green Economy Action Plan.
Reed hopes that in the coming years, The Exchange will lead more discussions around flood solutions, as water resource management and urban resilience to increasingly destructive storms have become some of the most important issues in protecting cities like New York from the effects of climate change.
“If we’re thinking about how to make our coastline and city more resilient to Hurricane Sandy, we have to be thinking about another Hurricane Sandy—plus climate change,” says Reed.
Brett Branco, director of the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay holds up one of FloodNet’s ultrasonic sensors, 200 of which are placed across New York’s five boroughs.
The HydroHeroes’ prototype is not the first project to use data monitoring to inform the public during a flood event. FloodNet, a free online tool for urban flood monitoring that launched in 2022, collects data from ultrasonic flood sensors positioned across New York City and publishes results to a dashboard that anyone can access.
FloodNet is the brainchild of Brett Branco, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Brooklyn College and director of the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay. Branco says the driving force behind FloodNet was the work that local communities had already done to keep each other informed about flooded areas.
During a 2018 climate forum hosted by the Institute in Hamilton Beach, Queens, Branco says he noticed a heavily flooded parking lot—an unusual sight on a sunny day with clear skies.
“We had just happened to schedule the meeting during a full moon [cycle] and high tide, and really got to see what sunny-day flooding looked like,” said Branco.
A FloodNet sensor information plaque on Howard and Marion streets in New York’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood.
“We learned that the community had a very active Facebook group that kept each other up-to-date on flooded areas, sharing pictures and keeping the community informed. We wanted to get this visual evidence of flooding out of these enclosed environments and make it visible to the city in meaningful ways, where most of the [solutions get created].”
After launching a flood watch program that sought to expand on the efforts of the Hamilton Beach facebook group, Branco says the Mayor’s Office of Climate Environmental Justice reached out to his team to expand the program. Knowing the program couldn’t rely solely on residents’ photo evidence of flooding, Branco partnered with colleague Ricardo Toledo-Crow to design ultrasonic flood sensors to monitor water depth during storms. Crow is now the Director of the NextGen Environmental Sensor Lab at CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center.
Every five minutes, these sensors measure whether the ground below has been flooded by calculating the length of time it takes for a sound pulse to return to the sensor. If the length of time correlates with the distance from the flood sensor to the sidewalk, then the area is not flooded. Using the same measurement technique, the sensor can calculate how high the water level is.
There are currently about 200 sensors across the city, and Mayor Eric Adams has announced that the city is on track to have about 500 sensors installed citywide by 2027. The sensor’s placements are determined in part by community feedback on areas prone to flooding.
Branco insists that the success of FloodNet would not have been possible without the on-the-ground work of the Hamilton Beach residents.
“A saying in community-engaged work that I take to heart is ‘Nothing about us without us,’”said Branco.
“We engage in knowledge exchanges with communities. The city realized how viable this data was, and funded an expansion of our sensor technology, which never would have happened without the work the Hamilton Beach community did.”
The Exchange at Governors Island hopes to generate more sustainable solutions like these in the coming years, with special attention to research that tackles “the most important elements of the climate challenge: air, policy research, and energy studies.”
The HydroHeroes expanded upon FloodNet’s central premise—using community-level data to pinpoint areas with heavy flooding—allowing emergency teams to intervene before the flood reaches critical infrastructure like major roadways and hospitals.
“This was a project we took on outside of class, and we’re very excited about it. It’s still in the early stages, but we hope to keep going with it. There’s more to be done,” said Venkateswaran.
