Welcome to the home page of Climate Change and a Global City: An Assessment of the Metropolitan East Coast Region. This study of the Metropolitan East Coast (MEC) area is one of eighteen regional components of The U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change, organized by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The goal of each regional assessment is to understand the impacts of climate change and variability on the physical systems and human activities of a specific area of the United States.
The study area for the MetroEast Coast Assessment covers the 31 counties of the New York City metropolitan region. The area consists of 13,000 square miles, with jurisdictions involving 1,600 cities, town, and villages in the three states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. The total regional population is 19.6 million, of which 7.3 live in New York City. Key to the assessment process is the identification of sectors that are vulnerable to the additional stresses that climate change and increased climate variability will introduce and the potential for adaptation strategies to cope with them. The MEC project focuses on seven sectors: Coasts, Wetlands, Transportation Infrastructure, Water Supply Management, Public Health, Energy, and Land-Use and Infrastructure Decision-Making. Each sector study assesses historical and potential climate impacts through analysis of the current conditions, lessons and evidence derived from past climate variability, scenario predictions, coping strategies, policy recommendations, and knowledge gaps. In this site you will find a general summary of the report and our findings, abstracts of each sectors work, climate data, and lesson plans that incorporate the data that we have used in our research. |
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