This week, I’m chatting with Jainey Bavishi, an expert in climate adaptation and resilience. We cover everything from social aid and pleasure clubs, to recovering from climate disasters, civic infrastructure, why we should absolutely not privatize weather forecasts, and – of course! – what getting it right in coastal cities looks like, in New York City, New Orleans, and beyond. I’m so glad to be sharing this conversation with you, because local action matters so much right now.

One in seven people in the U.S. live in coastal cities — that’s more than 47 million Americans. Plus, the U.S. coastal economy supports 54.6 million jobs and contributes $10 trillion to our total GDP. And this is certainly not a so-called "coastal elite" issue — poverty and unemployment rates are higher in coastal cities than the national average. Plus, coastal areas face the threats of sea level rise and storms made stronger and more damaging by climate change.

Climate adaptation for coastal cities is what we work on at Urban Ocean Lab, the nonprofit policy think tank I co-founded, and where Jainey is an advisor. But Jainey and I first met back in 2011, when we both worked in Washington, DC in the policy office at the headquarters of NOAA, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. She’s since gone on to work in the Obama White House, served as the director of climate resiliency for the City of New York, and headed back to DC to be the deputy administrator for the entire federal agency of NOAA under the Biden Administration. Now, she is a Senior Climate Resilience Fellow at the University of Miami.

JAINEY’s CALLS TO ACTION

* Take care of yourselves and take care of your communities.

* Invest in civic infrastructure, like mutual aid organizations.

* Call your member of Congress and ask them to protect NOAA and defend the services it provides.

REFERENCES

* Urban Ocean Lab policy think tank for climate adaptation in coastal cities (and our Urban Ocean Lab Substack newsletter)

* New York City’s East Side Coastal Resiliency Project

* Rebuild By Design’s Big U Project

* California’s $10M Bond Act (Proposition 4 Spending Plan)

* University of Miami Climate Resilience Institute

* NOAA Programs under attack:

* Office for Oceanic and Atmospheric Research

* National Estuarine Research Reserves

* National Coastal Zone Management Program

* Sea Grant Program

* National Weather Service

* In New York City, scientists project sea levels could rise up to six feet by 2100.

* During Superstorm Sandy, although 85% of the wetlands in New York and New Jersey had already been destroyed by development, what little remained prevented $625 million of damage.

CREDITS: Produced and edited by Matthew Nelson/Stramash Media and me, with help from Jenisha Shrestha and many thanks to our guest Jainey Bavishi.

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