September 20, 2022

Thank you, Diane. And thank you to Tom and Kala and the leadership of the IWA for their kind invitation to speak this morning.

Good morning.

I apologize for being dressed rather more casually than I had planned, but I’m afraid my suitcase with my sharp midnight blue suit did not make it onto my connecting flight last night. I guess whenever things go wrong in one of our water utilities we should remind ourselves that it could be worse—we could be running an airport. So please imagine me dressed rather like George Clooney and we’ll all be fine.

I’m honored to be here today, at the beginning of this important conference on the theme of water utilities and their role in smart, livable cities. I am a newcomer to the world of water—I just arrived in it only six months ago, when Mayor Eric Adams appointed me to my new role as both Chief Climate Officer of New York City and Commissioner of its Department of Environmental Protection—which makes me the CEO of New York City’s water and sewer system. It’s both an honor and a joy to lead a team of more than 5,000 men and women who are expert at their jobs and deeply dedicated to our agency’s mission. I learn something new from them every single day.

But I’m cognizant every day that I’m still a newcomer, since as you all know, careers in water are measured in decades, not in years. In my first week on the job I asked someone I met how long they had been at the agency and they said “Oh I’m new here, only 11 years.”

By that standard, I’ll be a newcomer for a while.

In contrast, I’ve been working on climate action in cities for long enough to be part of the old guard. In fact, my last time here at the Bella Center was with Mayor Bloomberg in 2009 for the UNFCC climate summit. And so I’m hopeful you’ll find value in my observations about what climate change demands from the water industry, from my own perspective in New York City.

I start with the recognition that in water perhaps even more than anything else, New York City is very lucky. We have been blessed both by geography and climate, and by a hundred-and-fifty year history of investment. Since the city was founded in 1624, New Yorkers have enjoyed a relatively mild, forgiving climate. Aside from winter snow, the city does not have a history of extreme rainfall, or frequent hurricanes, or other natural disasters. Our rainfall has historically been highly reliable and spread out across the year. Our city sits as the end of the Hudson River estuary, surrounded by low mountain ranges that capture water and allow us a supply system entirely driven by gravity. Despite being the most expensive city in the United States, New Yorkers’ water bills are only average among those of American cities.

Taking advantage of that environment, our water system dates back to the 1840s, when far-sighted officials began to build reservoirs north of the city and long aqueducts to bring that water into Manhattan. As New York City expanded, so did its supply, growing to a set of 19 reservoirs that extend as much as 200 km from the City. Two extensive water tunnels roughly 250 meters below ground were built to connect our receiving reservoirs to the water mains throughout the city. This growth phase of the City’s system lasted into the 1960s, when the most recent new reservoir was completed.

In that era, however, New York City was not a positive force on the environment. The City dumped sewage into its own rivers into the 1980s, and we dumped sludge into the ocean into the 1990s. Further, the City’s long history of ample water supply had led to laziness and waste, including resistance to water metering. And New York City’s fiscal difficulties in the 1970s—when the City government effectively declared bankruptcy—hobbled investment and maintenance.

This led to a period of reform from the 1970s through to the 2010s, which made DEP the modern water utility it is today. With nearly universal water metering and extensive conservation efforts now in place, New Yorkers have reduced per capita water consumption by roughly one third since the 1980s. Our reservoirs now have the capacity to store more than 500 days of water use.

Massive investments into a our 14 wastewater treatment plants have returned New York Harbor to health; today, we regularly see whales, dolphins, sharks, and seahorses in the harbor, a testament to the fact that we have dramatically cut the number of overflows from our combined sewer system. A new partnership with the communities in our watershed allowed us to avoid mechanical filtration and rely instead on natural systems to keep the bulk of our water supply clean.

And we innovated with green infrastructure lakes integrated into storm sewers—which we call bluebelts—and sidewalk bioswales—which we call rain gardens—to manage combined sewer overflows. An ongoing, 50-year project to build a third water tunnel will provide full redundancy of supply to virtually all parts of the city when it is completed in 2032.

Further, an institutional reform—one that ensured that New York City’s water investments would be at least partially insulated from political pressure—has enabled the roughly $14 billion in investments that we have made over the last decade.

With this background, the role of DEP Commissioner in 2022 should be really, really easy: keep everything humming along, and enjoy the benefits of good work from decades and centuries past. We should be able to focus on normal management: constantly improving customer service, managing repair cycles and capital maintenance, maintaining a motivated and expert workforce, and implementing new technology as it emerges.

But climate change has other plans for us.

Like everywhere else, New York’s climate is getting more hostile.

Hurricane Sandy, a decade ago next month, was our initial indication: in addition to the deaths of 40 New Yorkers, that storm—mainly a coastal inundation event but also a violent rain event—put unprecedented levels of organic matter into our normally very clean reservoirs, and flooded many of our treatment facilities and pump stations which are, in general, located on our shoreline and very close to sea level.

Last year, Hurricane Ida brought rainfall precisely twice as intense as ever previously recorded in New York City, with 9.5 centimeters falling in one hour when prior to last year, we have no records of rainfall more intense than 4.5 centimeters per hour. The ensuing flooding killed 13 New Yorkers, most of them—inconceivably—drowning in their own basement apartments.

While Ida was the most extreme, we’ve now seen two summers with regular rainfall events at or near our earlier historical records. Our sewers had been designed to meet those records of years past; now we have had several rain events this year alone where rainstorms met the design capacity of our sewers.

For the first time, we’ve begun to see how repeated surcharging conditions may be weakening specific designs in our sewer system, and we recently had two sinkholes, only a year apart, on the same block, which we find was caused by the pressure that these new intense rainstorms are causing and the weakness of one particular design of sewer. That sewer dated from 1916, so it served the city well for more than a century, and had never been tested like it was these past 14 months.

Climate change will also affect us from a different route. Half of our water comes from a different watershed—not from the Hudson but from the Delaware River to our west, which flows through upstate New York but then goes on to supply water to the city of Philadelphia and much of New Jersey. Increasingly we are worried that sea level rise will drive salt water up the river and reduce how much water we can divert without endangering those other users. Climate change is not only damaging our infrastructure, it is also revealing interdependencies and patterns that we have not previously noted.

All of this requires aggressive action.

We are forced to continue the work started after Sandy to protect New York City from storm surges, with a network of berms and barriers both natural and mechanical. This extensive set of projects is far from complete and requires renewed urgency.

We are forced to develop an integrated approach to using green infrastructure to complement our sewers. Basically, we will need to build enough green infrastructure to equal the existing absorption capacity of our sewer system.

Let me say that again: our sewers are designed today to handle between 4.5 and 5 centimeters of rain per hour; but Hurricane Ida gave us 9.5 centimeters. To prepare for an Ida-level storm, we need to build a green infrastructure network that can handle on its own as much water as the City’s entire sewer system built up over more than a century. We are only beginning the planning on this, but we know it will force us to work more closely with other city agencies and with the private sector—and invest huge sums of money rapidly and wisely. It will force us to integrate gray and green infrastructure planning to an extent we thus far have not done. It will require us to think about green infrastructure as equal in importance to gray infrastructure.

We are also forced to address the vulnerabilities of our wastewater treatment plants. This will require us to embrace modernization, and potentially even the consolidation of existing plants to locations that are more secure.

We are forced to develop better predictive capabilities so we can see when patterns emerge in failures in our infrastructure, because climate change is pressuring that infrastructure in ways that we are not familiar with, and where intuition alone cannot be our guide.

We are forced to plan for how we would handle a truly severe drought, which the Northeastern United States has not faced since the 1960s. And this, in turn, will require us to alter the zero-sum approach towards shared water supplies that characterizes so many water disputes.

Looking at the program for this week’s conference, I know that these are just New York’s own examples of the same priorities we are all forced to embrace: blue-green infrastructure and natural services; cross-border collaboration; planning for extremes that fall outside our historical knowledge; and massive investment.

What that says to me is that around the world, the real questions are no longer what we should do to tackle these problems, but how we go about doing it. And this means that implementation has got to be the core of the climate agenda.

We need our water and sewer providers across the globe to learn new tricks. This is a sector traditionally dominated by high-quality engineers who act deliberately and plan over long time frames. But we now need to act more quickly. Everything from our planning and engineering to our procurement and customer service processes need to be revamped to embrace speed and scale without sacrificing quality. The climate is changing faster than we can currently respond; it will do us little good to get everything done decades after climate change has done its worst to our cities.

We need to create new group dynamics in watersheds, so that we do not revert to the zero-sum games of the past, but rather act as true partners who are all facing the same growing challenges and all of whose needs must be met equitably. In some cases, that requires new institutions; in some, it may simply require new mindsets. In a few cases, we may find we cannot realize new mindsets without replacing individuals who refuse to let go of old prejudices. It may require also a new willingness to conduct joint projects or commit to new and unusual shared funding models. It will often require rebuilding trust.

We need to think about science differently. Water has long been a field that is driven by science and engineering; but it is also often driven by intuition and experience. Changing conditions mean that intuition based on the past is no longer as solid a predictor of the future as it once was. So we will need to ensure that we are relying on empirical analysis and embracing all the science. This, in turn, will require us to embrace more fully the power of technology to predict how our systems will perform under situations for which there are no precedents.

Finally, we will need to think differently about funding. In New York City, our user-paid utility model has served us very well for two generations. But there is an increasing realization that basing payments only on drinking water consumption ignores the extent to which land use decisions drive stormwater management needs. We will have no choice but to wrestle with the question of who pays, and to develop equitable approaches that move towards a just transition to a green economy.

It is a difficult challenge we have ahead of us. I am cognizant of the fact that despite the challenges I list, New York City has it easy compared to cities where climate change is having more dramatic impacts on supply, and where geography and history have not provided so many advantages.

This is one reason it is so important that we collaborate across borders. New York City has benefited from collaborations with Thames Water in London, Waternet in Amsterdam, and the City of Copenhagen—all of whom have much to teach us in New York. I’m particularly grateful to our host city of Copenhagen and I look forward tomorrow to signing an MOU with Copenhagen further deepening our work together on green infrastructure. And I’m proud to say that New York City has also worked with the Asian Development Bank, and colleagues in Fiji, Samoa, Brazil, and Pakistan to ensure that we are sharing our expertise globally. These are the kinds of exchanges that the IWA exists to foster, and exactly the ones we must build.

I’ll close, though, by restating my overall point.

Since I’m Chief Climate Officer for New York City as well as DEP Commissioner, I’m often asked what my most important climate initiatives are. I always say there are two. One is implementing New York’s laws requiring buildings to become more carbon-efficient; because 75% of our emissions come from buildings, this is our only way to meet our Paris targets.

Everyone understands that, and expects me to say it.

But I get a lot of curious looks when I tell them that my second most important climate initiative is speeding up my agency’s procurement process. That doesn’t sound like the kind of topic discussed at climate conferences. But it should be. To me, procurement reform is climate action. Because, if we cannot figure out how to select, design, procure, and implement capital projects faster, there is no way we can make New York City resilient to climate change in time for it to matter.

Over the last 25 years, climate action has changed. What we were still talking about here at the Bella Center in 2009 was at first a question of whether to do it, and then a question of what to do. Whether to do something is a policymaker’s question. What to do is an innovator’s question. But these are no longer the questions. We must do it, and we know what we have to do.

The questions today are when, and how, and whether it will be too late. When and how are the questions you pose to operators: to CEOs and project managers, to lead engineers and facility chiefs. That’s who is in this room, and those are the questions being asked of us here today: when and how.

That final question—whether it will be too late—is a question for historianss. Water systems inspire history. From the aqueducts of ancient Rome and the canals of ancient China to the water supplies of 20th-century Los Angeles and the treatment systems of 21st century Singapore, there are great engineering feats that inspire marvel. But those will not be the water histories of the next generation. The historians who write about us will not be focused on our engineering work.

No, they will primarily ask the question of whether we were good enough as operators to act quickly enough today to keep the water flowing and protect our cities from the impacts of climate change.

And our children will be asking the same question.

I wish you all a good, and impactful, conference. Thank you.