Stormwater Resiliency Plan
Mayor de Blasio has released New York City’s Stormwater Resiliency Plan, which includes the City’s first-ever city-wide analysis of flooding caused by extreme rainfall events. Unlike coastal storms, such as hurricanes and Nor’easters, extreme rainfall can cause flooding in any part of the city, including inland neighborhoods that are miles from the shoreline. The New York City Panel on Climate Change has projected that New York City will become significantly wetter as global warming continues to worsen, with rainfall expected to increase by as much as 25 percent by the end of the century. This will place a growing strain on New York City’s drainage infrastructure, which includes a mix of traditional sewer systems, nature-based Bluebelts, and more than 10,000 distributed green infrastructure assets that capture and absorb stormwater runoff and have the added benefit of reducing localized flooding.
The Stormwater Resiliency Plan outlines goals and initiatives for the City to implement over a period of 10 years, including new policies for resilient stormwater management, the integration of future-looking climate change projections into our long-term drainage planning, changes to the City’s flash flood emergency response procedure, and an increased focus on public communications related to rainfall-based flooding. The analysis also resulted in the City’s first ever maps showing flood vulnerability from rainfall events under future climate conditions. These New York City Stormwater Flood Maps visualize the impacts of a moderate rainfall event with future sea level rise and an extreme rainfall event with future sea level rise.
