New York City Sustainable Development Initiative Panel Series Overview

The New York City Sustainable Development Initiative hosted a series of panels this past semester addressing a range of topics, including the politics of urban waste management, the effects of transportation patterns on asthma rates and the losses and gains of biodiversity in New York City. All three topics are currently prevalent in environmental policy debates centered in the City. The panels were meant to facilitate conversation between experts and practitioners in order to arrive at viable solutions to these problems.

The first panel entitled “Waste Not. What to Do with Waste?” was moderated by Dr. Steven Cohen, Executive Director of the New York City Sustainable Development Initiative and Director of the Office of Educational Programs at the Earth Institute. Dr. Nickolas Themelis and Dr. Kate Ascher discussed the 26,000 tons of garbage that the City produces every day and methods for its disposal.

Themelis, Director of the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia, who has researched waste disposal for years, presented his findings on disposal possibilities in New York and other major cities throughout the world. Ascher, Executive Vice President of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, discussed the city politics of disposal and how waste transportation and removal affect the City’s neighborhoods.

The second panel, “Public Health, Public Trasnport, Public Access to Healthcare” was again moderated by Cohen and included experts from the Columbia University faculty, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and West Harlem Environmental Action (WeAct). The four panelists discussed the affect of transportation patterns and pollution on the Harlem asthma rates, which are five times higher than the national average.

Dr. Mary Northridge, Associate Professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, discussed her experience with Harlem families afflicted by asthma and its effect on education and daily life. Working with the Harlem Children’s Zone Asthma Initiative (HCZAI), Northridge has experienced first hand the effects of pollution and poor health care options on a community’s livelihood. Cecil Corbin-Mark, Program Director of WeAct, emphasized the need for interconnected approaches to this environmental and health problem, and criticized the lack of communication between research and policy.

Most recently, Dr. Don J. Melnick, Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, moderated the third and final panel of the series entitled “Gains and Losses for New York City Biodiversity.” At this panel, a range of experts from the Columbia University faculty, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Wildlife Trust and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation addressed the loss of 600 species from New York City in the last 100 years, as well as the recent arrival of a number of invasive species to the region.

The panel’s experts emphasized the need for community support to facilitate cohesion between environmental and societal interests when responding to biodiversity issues. Dr. Eric Sanderson, Adjunct Associate Research Scientist at Columbia’s Center for Environmental Research and Conservation, presented his digital reconstruction of Manhattan in the year 1609 as a reminder for current and future generations of the rich ecological history of the island. Dr. Scott Newman, Conservation Medicine Scientist at the Wildlife Trust, argued that problems such as wildlife disease can actually be avoided through careful conservation efforts.

The panelists also discussed past community-based efforts, such as the environmental justice movement in Harlem, watershed management for the NYC water supply, and the logging ban in the Philippines, which have successfully merged environmental conservation with community concerns. In regards to the current flood of invasive species into New York City, Dr. James Danoff-Burg, Adjunct Professor of Columbia’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology, advocated a better understanding of the effects of invasive species. While he acknowledged concerns over the ecologically destructive effect of these species, he emphasized that new species can also be beneficial to a community’s ecosystem.

All three panels, held in November and December, were well-attended by students and faculty from across the University and local community groups. In light of the panels’ success, the New York City Initiative plans to hold another panel series this spring. This series will be centered around the many sustainable development projects currently being researched in the New York City region. The NYC Initiative is currently working on over forty projects, including research on the safety of cable-suspension bridges, the recycling of hardened concrete, urban heat island mitigation strategies, mapping the Hudson River, and effects of the weather and air pollution on human mortality. These projects can be viewed at http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/nyc/projects.html.