By Emma Bonino
ROME, Dec 31 2015 (IPS)

The appalling crisis ravaging the Middle East and striking terror around the world is a clear challenge to the West, but responses are uncoordinated. This is due on the one hand to divergent analyses of the situation, and on the other to conflicting interests.

Emma Bonino

The West has historic alliances with the Gulf area, but apparently nothing has been learned from the 3,000 deaths caused by the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. Turkey plays by its own rules, while Russia does not hesitate to resort to any means to recover its position on the global stage, and is only now showing concern about the so-called foreign combatants that Turkey is allowing into Syria. In truth, there is very little common ground.

Consequently, all reactions are inadequate, including the bombing of territory occupied by the Islamic State – whether motivated by emotion or based on reason with an eye to the next elections – by countries like France or the United Kingdom, which wants to demonstrate in this way to the rest of Europe that it is an indispensable part of the EU. Bombings take place, only to be followed by public recognition that aerial strikes are insufficient because there are no more targets to be hit from the sky without guidance from troops on the ground.

The fact is that while the impossibility of achieving victory by air attacks alone is repeated like a mantra, the bombings continue. At the same time, every Arab medium complains daily that these are acts of war waged, once again, by the West against the Arab world.

Doubtless for this reason, the British government has not only increased its military budget but also given the BBC more funding for Arabic language services. The battle in hand is above all a cultural one; arguments are needed over the medium and long term, in addition to attempts at overcoming the contradictions.

The first step is to admit that there is no magical solution; only partial and complex solutions exist. The first measure must be to oblige Sunni Muslims, the Gulf monarchies and the Muslim Brotherhood – the sources of funds and material support for Islamic State combatants – to assume responsibility for their roles. Secondly, we in Europe must take serious measures to address our own shortcomings, by reinforcing our security.

EU counter-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerchove recently appealed for an agreement to unify the intelligence services of European countries, to no avail. European governments do not want a common intelligence service, they do not want a common defence system, and they do not want a common foreign policy. Some are only willing to commit their air forces to the fray.

In the meantime, we lurch from one emergency to another, managing only to agree on improvised, temporary measures. For instance, now we have forgotten all about the immigrants, as if they had ceased to exist. Vision is lacking, not only for the long term but even for the medium term.

Now European governments are focused on Syria, leaving aside the conflicts in Libya and Yemen, and are not giving needed help to our Mediterranean neighbours threatened by serious crises: Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan. Lately, oil facilities in the Islamic State are being bombed and the tanker trucks used for black market oil exports are being attacked. As is well known, during the first Gulf War bombing of oil wells brought about an ecological disaster and history is repeating itself in the territories occupied by the Islamic State. Meanwhile the attacks on ground transport are blocking supplies of provisions to Syria, where food is already scarce.

For its part, Italy has done well in choosing not to participate in military interventions that risk being counterproductive and that no one believes are effective, as shown by other scenarios from Afghanistan to the Lebanon. But this does not exempt Italy from making greater efforts toward a common European intelligence service and a broader and more efficacious immigration policy.

In a nutshell: the European Union should formulate and apply its own foreign policy in line with its own interests and reality, and dispense with the policies of the United States, Russia, or other powers.

Translated by Valerie Dee

Excerpt:

Medical marijuana from a dispensary in California. Credit: David Trawin/cc by 2.0

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
NEW YORK, Feb 4 2015 (IPS)

A bill which will bring medical marijuana to New York State in 2016 will leave the treatment inaccessible to low-income patients, community groups warn.

New Yorkers spoke out about limitations to the draft regulations of the Compassionate Care Act, which should introduce medical marijuana to the state early next year.“I have stage four prostate cancer, so I have access, but I’m trying to broaden this for those who aren’t included. I’m concerned about veterans with post traumatic stress, victims of agent orange, traumatic brain injury from IEDs, and the effects of depleted uranium poisoning." -- Bill Gilson

At a public forum held Tuesday in the Bronx, concerns were raised about the proposed regulations, including access for low income patients, and the small number of illnesses which qualify for the treatment.

“The Department of Health can create incentives for industry,” said Julie Netherland of the Drug Policy Alliance, a drug-reform advocacy organisation that worked with legislators during negotiations.

“One of the things they could weigh as criteria for selecting companies who will produce the strains would be their plan to support low-income patients,” said Netherland.

The bill was signed into law last July, but the programme will likely be implemented in New York State in January 2016. This will be nearly two decades after medical marijuana was first introduced to the United States, with an initiative in California to allow medical cannabis in 1996.

Some 23 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have legalised cannabis for medical use, and four allow its recreational use.

In their current form, the regulations allow treatment for only 10 illnesses: cancer, HIV/AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury with spasticity, epilepsy, inflammatory bowel disease, neuropathy, and Huntington’s disease.

The commissioner of health for New York State, Howard Zucker, has the power to include any number of conditions as he sees fit.

To pass the bill, legislators were forced to drastically narrow the eligibility criteria, according to the Alliance.

In the bill’s original form, marijuana was to be prescribed at a physician’s discretion. Partway through negotiations, it was reduced to 25 conditions, then in the final days before being passed, it was cut to just 10.

Those with anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and rheumatoid arthritis would be ineligible for the treatment.

Bill Gilson, president of the New York City chapter of Veterans for Peace, told IPS, “I have stage four prostate cancer, so I have access, but I’m trying to broaden this for those who aren’t included. I’m concerned about veterans with post-traumatic stress, victims of Agent Orange, traumatic brain injury from IEDs (improvised explosive devices), and the effects of depleted uranium poisoning.

“The Department of Health has to broaden the eligibility conditions,” he said.

There is no requirement that insurance cover medical marijuana, raising concerns that the treatment will be inaccessible to low-income groups.

Also under the regulations, as patients are not allowed to smoke the drug, they will be using vaporisers, which range in cost, and a registration fee is needed in order to receive a patient identification card.

The Drug Policy Alliance is calling on the department of health to make companies who want to produce the marijuana come up with a plan to support those with lower incomes who need the treatment.

Another option could be for the state government to divert some of the significant tax money to support those in need. Medicaid will not provide for the treatment.

The small scale of the proposed programme was also criticised. There will be only five producers of the drug and 20 dispensaries across the whole state.

Netherland from the Alliance told IPS, “It’s insufficient to meet patient demand. Also geographically, having just 20 dispensaries across a state 54,000 square miles large isn’t enough.”

Many see the regulations as a step toward full legalisation of marijuana in the state, including New York City Council member Mark Levine, who told IPS, “I’m really excited, but there are many limitations we need to address. I see this legislation as a step towards taxation and regulation.”

Limitations have also been placed on the delivery method the treatment will take – only oils and extracts are allowed, no smoking.

As the 45-day public comment period comes to a close on February 13th, those with concerns are encouraged to submit testimony on the New York State Department of Health website.

Marijuana is still illegal under federal law, although four states have now legalised it for recreational use, and 23 states and the District of Columbia have enacted medical marijuana laws.

Helen Redmond, a clinical social worker for the NGO Community Access, told IPS, “The exciting thing is, for the people who I work with, medical marijuana will help. Some people with mental illness have symptoms that are very distressing, for example, hearing voices, anxiety.

“Marijuana lowers the anxiety that they feel, and can boost a sense of wellbeing. It’s a beautiful thing. There are few side effects.

“Having a registration fee is problematic,” she added. “Also oils and extracts cost more to produce compared to having plant material – people can’t afford that. There are so many people in New York who are at poverty level or below. People who need medicine, their lives matter.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A mural in Bushwick aims to raise awareness about residents' rights in dealing with the police. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Aug 27 2013 (IPS)

A colourful mural occupies the full left side facade of a three-storey house on the corner of Irving and Gates Avenue in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bushwick. It depicts a group of youths taking cellphone footage of an arrest scene. Above it, a message reads, “You have the right to watch and film police activities.”

“We painted this mural to make people aware of their rights,” says 19-year-old Justin Serrano, who grew up in this predominantly Hispanic community, where about a third of households live below the poverty line.

The mural, painted by youths at Make the Road New York, a non-governmental organisation that offers community and youth-empowerment programmes in working-class communities across the city, reflects the prevalence of police in the lives of young people in Bushwick. It also provides insight into their relationship with the New York Police Department (NYPD) in their community."It makes me feel like I'm non-human."
-- Justin Serrano, on stop and frisk tactics

For youths growing up in communities of colour, such as Bushwick, that relationship over the last decade has been marked by one policing tactic in particular: Stop, Question and Frisk.

Stop and frisk, as it’s popularly known, allows police officers to stop and search persons under reasonable suspicion they are involved in criminal activity. It’s a staple tactic in New York’s zero-tolerance approach to policing and has become the modus operandi under the city’s last two mayors.

A high return rate?

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city’s police commissioner Ray Kelly have credited the policy with a citywide decline in violent crime and 8,000 guns being taken off the streets.

Criminal justice scholars and civil liberties advocates, meanwhile, have long questioned the policy’s effectiveness and the police department’s predominant focus on poor communities of colour.

Available NYPD data shows that between 2003 and 2012, New York police performed close to five million stops. In roughly 88 percent of these stops, the subject was black or Hispanic.

In 90 percent of stops, police were unable to prove any wrongdoing. Last year alone, blacks and Hispanics were subject to nearly 400,000 innocent stops.

While the number of stops skyrocketed in recent years, gun recovery has been persistently low throughout the decade, at less than one percent of stops.

Collateral damage

Change seems to be on the horizon after two historic wins for police-reform advocates in New York this month, but community advocates and criminal justice scholars emphasise the collateral damage created by millions of innocent stops.

The explosive rise in the number of stops involving young men of colour has raised particular concern about the adverse impact on generations of youths growing up “overpoliced“, according to researcher Brett Stoudt, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the CUNY Graduate Centre.

From 2008 to 2009, youths between the ages of 14 and 21 made up one-third of all stops while accounting for only one-tenth of the city’s population, one of his studies revealed.

Stoudt says that repeatedly being stopped under suspicion of criminal activity without having done anything wrong has a demoralising and disempowering effect on young people.

The high number of stops in select neighbourhoods also creates a “cyclical environment” by increasing the chances that youth in these communities “for one reason or another” are caught up in the criminal justice system, according to Stoudt, co-author of the recently report “Stop, Question and Frisk Policing Practices in New York City“.

For example, “during a stop, an officer may find a small amount of marijuana. Or [the young person] can get scared and they run,” he tells IPS.

Changing behaviour

“It makes me feel like I’m non-human,” says Serrano of the more than twenty times he’s been stopped. On one occasion, he was rushing home to bring medicine to his mom and ended up at the local precinct instead.

In New York, young people’s experiences with police don’t stop in the streets – they also extend into schools and residential buildings, where NYPD can legally be present.

This surveillance of all aspects of daily life can lead youth to significantly change their personal behaviour, says Stoudt, including not seeking help from police when they need it.

Sitting on a bench at a local playground, Serrano takes a minute from eating ice cream to offer advice to two younger friends pulling up on BMX bicycles.

“You gotta stop riding your bike, man,” he says. “Since I started riding my skateboard, I’ve been stopped way less.”

Serrano also stopped “hanging out” inside his community, he says. Instead, he meets his friends in a gentrified section of a nearby neighbourhood, where they are not bothered.

In the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Flatbush, a few miles south of Bushwick, Keron Gray says he avoids being outside with his “louder friends” and stays clear of routes where he is more likely to be stopped.

“It’s annoying,” says Gray. “When you’re shopping on Fifth Avenue [in Manhattan], that doesn’t happen.”

Is reform inevitable?

City officials have long defended the tactic of stop and frisk by pointing to a higher prevalence of violent crimes in target communities.

In a landmark decision on Aug. 12, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin rejected that argument, ruling that the NYPD’s application of stop and frisk created “a policy of indirect racial profiling” that had violated the constitutional rights of non-whites.

Scheindlin, who found that “the racial composition of a precinct or census tract predicts the stop rate above and beyond the crime rate,” ordered a sweeping reform process.

Last week,  New York’s City Council overrode a mayoral veto and passed two bills that establish independent oversight over NYPD policies and expand legal recourse against bias-based profiling.

The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg, who has moved to appeal the federal ruling, has warned that both decisions will stifle police work and cause a surge in violent crime.

But between this month’s events and a new mayor taking office in 2014, reform seems inevitable for the nation’s largest police force.

For Serrano, however, some damage is irreparable. “The first time I was stopped, I was with my little brother… To this day, [he] sees me different[ly] – he sees me as a criminal.”

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Aug 14 2013 (IPS)

Like many people living in the path of Hurricane Sandy last fall, Lauren Scrivo needed more battery power. Despite a call offering help from the mayor of Fairfield, New Jersey, where Scrivo lives with her family, her concerns went far beyond extra water bottles and flashlights.

An emergency shelter at Seward Park High School in Lower Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy that disabled people had a hard time accessing. Credit: Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (CIDNY)

Scrivo, a communications specialist at the Kessler Foundation, has a form of muscular dystrophy and uses a ventilator and power wheelchair. When the electricity went down during the storm, she only had battery power to fuel the machine; leaving the generator running outside was too risky.

“When we lost power it was a little scary, we didn’t know how long it would be for. I couldn’t leave the generator running at night because people were stealing them, so [I] had to use battery power,” Scrivo told IPS.

The gas shortage also presented an enormous danger for Scrivo as her generator began to run low on fuel.

“You can’t just go out and stand in the gas line,” she said. “If we couldn’t fuel our generator, we wouldn’t have been able to recharge my [ventilator] batteries or use my other necessary medical equipment.”

Now Scrivo, along with the global disabled community, will have the opportunity to voice her concerns after the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) launched a survey asking people with disabilities about their experience living with and preparing for disasters.

The survey, believed to be the first time global data on emergency planning and disabilities is being collected, asks participants what kind of emergency, from landslides to insect infestations, their communities are vulnerable to, and whether they have been involved in municipal emergency management planning.

“We know from a number of major disasters that disabled people are overlooked… twice as many [disabled] people died in the Fukushima disaster [than non-disabled people],” Denis McClean, spokesperson for UNISDR, told IPS from Geneva.

Roughly 10 percent of the world’s population is living with a disability, according to data from UN Enable, the United Nations body that focuses on disability issues.

“It’s quite clear that we need to pay more attention and talk to disabled people,” McClean said, adding that disabled people are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to early response in emergencies.

New York City’s disabled population, which numbers over 800,000 according to data from the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York (CIDNY), recently had to deal with devastation from Sandy.

During the storm, there were 118,000 disabled people in the Zone 1 evacuation area alone, according to CIDNY.

Milagros Franco, a disaster case manager for Sandy survivors at the Brooklyn Centre for Independence of the Disabled (BCID), believes that disaster planning and response for disabled people in New York City is inadequate.

“I was kind of snobbish… I got some food beforehand, I had two flashlights. I live in Manhattan, so I didn’t expect the lights to go out,” Franco, who has cerebral palsy and uses a power wheelchair, told IPS.

The day before Sandy made landfall in New York, Franco’s superintendent told her the building’s elevator would be shut down as the lobby of her East 21st Street building is prone to flooding. Although she lives on the second floor, “When you’re in a wheelchair, that’s pretty far,” Franco says.

Franco was stuck in her building for three days, but did have a friend with her who ventured to 34th Street for food and phone recharging. In lieu of the buzzer system, which was a victim of the power outage, Franco lowered her keys, tied to a piece of rope, out her window to let her friend inside.

But some people aren’t so lucky to have a support system, said Margi Trapani, communications and education director at CIDNY. Enlisting the support of family and friends is one of the main ways the City of New York tells disabled people to prepare for disasters, along with preparing a “go bag” of emergency supplies and knowing how and when to evacuate.

Trapani’s organisation, alongside BCID and two individual plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit against Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City of New York in 2011 after perceiving a lack of help from the city for people with disabilities during disasters in the decade following the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks. The case was heard in March, with the judge’s ruling expected at the end of the summer.

“During 9/11, people with disabilities had been left off the map,” Trapani told IPS. “There were a lot of respiratory problems and mental health issues [after], tonnes of issues no one was prepared to deal with.”

Hurricane Sandy revealed the inadequacy of emergency shelters for the city’s disabled population. Issues with the shelters include non-accessible and stairs-only entrances, lack of accessible bathrooms and cots, and staff who are underprepared to respond to disabled people, Trapani says.

More inclusion of disabled community in the emergency management planning process is a step the city can take to improve its response, Trapani says.

“Our community can help in these situations… we’re experts in figuring out how to deal with problems,” she says.

When a disaster strikes at short notice, there is sometimes a limit to how ready people can be.

“No matter how prepared you think you are, you’re never prepared until after the fact,” Franco said, adding that at least now she has a hand-crank radio.

(See Part Two and Part Three of the series)

Excerpt:

One of the organic waste collection bins distributed to New York households. Credit: Kim-Jenna Jurriaans/IPS

By Kim-Jenna Jurriaans
NEW YORK, Aug 6 2013 (IPS)

Ask a random New Yorker what their city is famous for and “composting” is about as likely to make the list as “cheap housing” and “warm winters”. But if it is up to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, this will soon change.

Bloomberg, who will leave office at the end of this year, announced in June that the city’s Department of Sanitation has begun collecting organic waste in pilot communities across New York and plans to drastically expand the number of participating households in the coming two years.

The ultimate goal will be mandatory organic waste recycling for all city households by 2016. The waste will be turned into compost, a fertiliser obtained from decomposed organic matter, or converted into a source of clean energy.

The initiative is part of Bloomberg’s plan to divert 75 percent of city trash from landfills by 2030 and cut down on the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, to which trash contributes about three percent.

Currently, New York City is hauling a large part of its solid waste, more than 14 million tons annually, to out-of-state landfills in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Ohio, where it is paying 86 dollars a ton to dump the trash – transportation costs not included.

If the residents of the city’s nearly three million residential units separate organic matter from regular trash, the city hopes to divert 1.2 million tons of garbage from landfills. This move could save up to 100 million dollars per year, or just under a third of the total money spent annually to dispose of residential trash, according to the Department of Sanitation.

The initiative’s test phase currently involves two high-rises in Manhattan, the neighborhood of Westerleigh in Staten Island, as well as around 100 restaurants and public schools across the city.

But the Department of Sanitation is preparing to expand the scope to 150,000 single-family homes, 70 high-rises across all five of New York’s boroughs as early as 2014.

About a quarter of New York City trash is made up by residential garbage. Roughly another quarter is produced by businesses, and with 70 percent of that trash coming from restaurants, getting the hospitality sector involved in the initiative is an important part of the composting pie.

For eco-conscious restaurants that are already paying for special food waste pick-up, a citywide scheme for restaurants would likely be welcome. For others, with small kitchens, adding an extra bin may not be feasible, as a report on restaurants published Jun. 20 by the New York Times shows.

In addition to easing the burden on the environment and the city’s chequebook, there are various other ways in which New York can benefit from collecting organics, according to Ron Gonen, deputy commissioner of sanitation for the City of New York.

“There are two main things that can happen with your organic waste currently,” Gonen told Tierramérica*. “It can be turned into compost, which is an organic fertiliser – and we have a composting facility here in New York City – and that compost is donated to local parks and gardens or sold to landscapers.”

“You can also convert organic waste to renewable energy via a process called anaerobic digestion (in the absence of oxygen),” he added. The result is a methane-rich biogas.

New York already has one anaerobic digestor in one of its waste water treatment facilities, and the city is considering issuing a call for proposals for a large anaerobic digesting facility that could convert most of New York City’s food waste either into natural gas or clean electricity.

“But there are also some interesting emerging technologies,” said Gonen.

“One, for example, can turn food waste into a clean-burning fuel called DME (dimethyl ether, a substitute for gas oil), so it’s not unforeseeable that sometime in the near future we’d be running our sanitation vehicles off of the food waste we collect,” he added.

Changing attitudes

Westerleigh, a neighbourhood of 3,500 residents in the New York borough of Staten Island, is one of the test communities for the new composting initiative. While the participation rate stands at around 50 percent, responses of participants are mixed.

Rosemary Caccese, who was already composting in her own backyard before Bloomberg’s plan, welcomes the new city programme. “I put mine out every week,” she told Tierramérica, referring to her new brown trash can that gets picked up once a week.

“It’s work, it’s not easy to do,” she added, but as someone who cares about the environment, it is a small price to pay for her.

When it comes to citywide implementation, she expects it may be difficult for the elderly to keep up.

Across the street, Donald Carullo says the fact that he and his wife are older is precisely what allows them to participate in the initiative. For his son, who has three children, on the other hand, it is too time consuming, he told Tierramérica.

Over on Burnside Avenue, Lois Conti, who describes herself as “green” and proudly runs down a laundry list of environmentally friendly features she has added to her house, is nevertheless sceptical about the new plan, mainly for practical and design reasons.

“My girlfriend has five children; you’re going to need more than this,” she told Tierramérica, while pointing at the new oval-shaped one-gallon (4.4 litres) container in her kitchen, one of the two models that the city is distributing to households.

For a small household like hers, it is hardly worth the effort, she said. And in a hot New York summer, “It starts to smell.”

Changing attitudes is a large part of the challenge for the city in the coming months. Emphasising the financial savings to the city, and ultimately to the taxpayer, is essential to selling the programme, says Gonen.

While the current phase is voluntary, the programme would eventually become mandatory and include fines for trash offenders.

Alexander Allen, who talked to Tierramérica at one of a few dozen compost drop-off locations in the city, thinks the initiative makes a lot of sense environmentally.

He is less sure whether making it mandatory is going to work, however, and thinks that fines alone will not be enough to change attitudes. “In the end, it’s up to people,” he said.

New York City is following in the footsteps of other U.S. cities like San Francisco and Seattle that have implemented similar initiatives. But it is also charting new ground.

“There is no city in North America, and perhaps Europe, where waste management is as complicated as in New York City,” said Gonen.

“We have an old built environment, we have a diverse built environment, and we’re multicultural,” he noted.

But this also means an opportunity for the Big Apple to serve as an example for other cities around the world.

“There is no other major city,” he said, “that can look at what New York City accomplishes and say ‘Oh, we couldn’t do that, we have a more complex system.’”

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

 VIDEO: Compost Collection Challenges New Yorkers’ Fast Lifestyles

Excerpt:

In June, New York state legislature will vote on a bill that will increase protection for sex trafficking victims. Credit: Bigstock

By Lucy Westcott
NEW YORK, Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

It started for Ruth when she was 12 years old and for Lowyal when she was 13. After being raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Ruth ran away from home and was picked up by a pimp, who sold her into prostitution.

Lowyal, bullied at school and facing a deteriorating situation at home, dropped out of school and eventually began working on the streets. In a drawing Lowyal created to depict this traumatic time in her life, a wide eye reflects a city skyline as red flames curl at the bottom, with menacing faces on both sides.

This month, New York’s legislature will vote on the New York Trafficking Victims and Protection and Justice Act (TVPJA), which would give more protection to girls like Ruth and Lowyal, and harsher punishments for those who trafficked them. It is part of the Women’s Equality Act that supporters hope will be voted on before the legislative session ends Jun. 20.

Equality Now, an international human rights organisation, is working with the Jewish Child Care Association and the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition to get the law passed.

The organisation is encouraging supporters to send letters to Governor Andrew Cuomo, Assemblyman Sheldon Silver, and State Senator Dean G. Skelos.

The TVPJA will direct resources to toughening laws to target and arrest pimps and buyers rather than victims. And under the new law, penalties for buying sex from a minor will be similar to those for statutory rape.

The law would also mean that all prostituted persons under the age of 18 are treated as trafficking victims instead of criminals in the state of New York. Currently, 16- and 17-year-olds arrested for prostitution are prosecuted as adults.

“There are two provisions that we are having a hard time with and [are] getting opposition to,” Lauren Hersh, New York director of Equality Now, told IPS. Hersh is perplexed as to why these provisions are problematic."Sex trafficking is happening within New York City, and many of its victims are American-born."
-- Lauren Hersh

The first is making sex trafficking a violent felony in New York State, which would send a message to law enforcement that trafficking is a violent crime, Hersh explained.

“Talk to any sex trafficking victim, and they’ll tell you how violent it is,” she added.

The second is aligning New York state law with U.S. federal law, which does not require prosecutors to prove that minors were coerced into sexual acts. Under the current law, with most cases in New York, victims have to testify in court, Hersh said.

“The New York State assembly is historically against raising penalties,” Emily Amick, staff attorney at Sanctuary for Families and legislative director for the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition, told IPS.

“The law needs to evolve,” Amick said. “Albany is letting politics get in the way of helping people,” she added, with state lawmakers who oppose these provisions working against the livelihoods and futures of sex trafficking victims.

Despite some opposition, Hersh sees the bill as “excellent and comprehensive”.

The fact that women and girls are being trafficked not only inside U.S. borders, but also within city limits, may be a surprise to some people, Hersh said.

“When people think of sex trafficking, they often only think of women and girls being smuggled across international borders. But sex trafficking is happening within New York City, and many of its victims are American-born,” Hersh said in a statement.

Legislative justice is one part of the solution. Sexually exploited girls like Ruth and Lowyal should also be given a voice in the process of advocacy and justice, Hersh said. Project IMPACT, a New York-based programme that allows trafficking victims to share their stories, if and how they choose to, is one way to do so.

“I think telling my story matters because it could help other girls like me,” Veronica, another formerly trafficked girl, said, after sharing her story at Project IMPACT. “Storytelling is important because I lived this – I’m the one who knows what it’s really like.”

Ruth, Lowyal and Veronica are part of Gateways, a residential treatment program for commercially sexually exploited youth that is run by the Jewish Child Care Association and allows them to rebuild their lives and self-esteem. Some Gateways residents visited Albany in May to lobby for the bill’s passing.

Reliable statistics on sex trafficking are difficult to obtain due to the hidden and underground nature of the crime, according to Hersh, but a 2010 State Department report put the number of people trafficked to the United States each year at around 15,000.

Two million children are exploited each year in the international commercial sex trade, according to 2012 data from the International Labour Organisation, which also estimates that women and girls make up 98 percent of sex trafficking victims.

And in the United States, while little data is available for the number of victims, the FBI estimates that 293,000 American children and teenagers are at risk of becoming victims of commercial sexual exploitation.

“The only way we’re going to have justice in New York is to pass this bill in its entirety,” Hersh told IPS.

Indian Point is classified as a potential target for terrorist attacks, due to its proximity to New York City and to over 20 million residents. Credit: Daniel Case/cc by 3.0

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

Over one million kgs of nuclear waste sit in limbo on the banks of the Hudson River, in dry cask storage units and spent fuel pools just 60 kms north of New York City, according to environmental organisations.  

The original plan was to bury the nuclear waste in a national repository deep beneath Yucca Mountain, in the southwestern deserts of the U.S. But that plan fell through when President Barack Obama’s administration defunded the project.

Nuclear waste is known for its long-lasting qualities and is often associated with unpredictable health effects that metastasise over many years.

The waste along the Hudson River belongs to Indian Point Energy Center, a nuclear power plant run by Entergy Corporation. Indian Point has endured a series of incidents in its 52-year span, including radioactive leaks, transformer explosions and ensuing fires.

Indian Point is classified as a potential target for terrorist attacks, due to its proximity to New York City and to over 20 million residents. It is also located precariously on two fault lines, which led critics to dub it “Fukushima on the Hudson”, in reference to the March 2011 nuclear catastrophe in Japan following an earthquake and a tsunami.

Indian Point made local headlines last week when the U.S. Government Accountability Office produced a report warning residents within a 16 km radius of nuclear operations that in case of a nuclear emergency, those fleeing the area would likely jam evacuation routes.

Indian Point’s two functioning units are up for relicensing in 2014 and 2016, to operate for an additional 20 years.

“If that does go through, they’ll generate approximately an additional (one million kilogrammes) of waste,” said Deborah Brancato, a staff attorney at Riverkeeper, who has been engaged in an ongoing legal campaign to close Indian Point.

Brancato noted that dry cask storage units and spent fuel pools were meant to be temporary solutions to hold nuclear waste, and that they were untested for longtime use.

“The radioactivity in the pool is actually five times the radioactivity at the (plant’s) cores… The pools have a history of leaking radioactive water, so they’re already in a degraded condition,” she told IPS.

Asked how the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) – an independent agency established by Congress in 1974 to ensure the safe use of radioactive materials – has approached Indian Point, Brancato said, “They’ve been in lockstep with Entergy and have taken on the same positions.”

She noted that the NRC and the Entergy Corporation have largely ignored environmental concerns associated with Indian Point, even though such concerns were raised by the state and the environmental organisations in the area.

Manna Jo Greene, the environmental action director at the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, told IPS that Indian Point’s routine release of radioactive steam into the air and nuclear waste into the groundwater also pose serious health risks.

“That’s something that needs to be analysed by the NRC and a solution found, but they were punting. They either punt or they give out waivers (citing) existent laws, which are not protective enough,” she argued, explaining that the NRC has taken a “hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to Indian Point’s potential health effects.

“We know that when nuclear power plants shut down, certain cancer rates and thyroid problems decline fairly quickly over time,” she added.

Greene, who has been organising in the Hudson Valley since the civil rights movement, told IPS that the regulatory agencies she works with – such as the Environmental Protection Agency, New York State Department of Health and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation – are usually neutral and nonpartisan.

“But that’s not the case with the NRC,” she argued. “Their comments are sometimes more harsh on the interveners than the companies. They see their mission as to keep the (nuclear) industry going.”

The NRC – lauded internationally for its safety standards – has also been criticised for pandering to the interests of the commercial entities it is tasked to regulate.

Last month, Gregory Jaczko – a former chairman of the NRC – told Nuclear Intelligence Weekly (NIW) that the 103 nuclear plants currently operating across the U.S. should be phased out for health and safety reasons.

According to NIW, Jaczko – who regularly sparred with his four fellow commissioners while at the NRC – resigned from his post in 2012, claiming that he was a victim of a nuclear industry-backed effort to oust him from office.

Greene said, “These (nuclear) industries and NRC staff work on (legal) cases all over the country, and they get to know each other and develop a very cordial relationship.”

She added, “There’s a lot of familiarity… and somewhat of a revolving door between the industry and the oversight agency.”

Nuclear waste and river ecology

Paul Gallay, president of Riverkeeper, told IPS that Indian Point’s nuclear waste –which seeps into the groundwater and drips into the Hudson River – also affects marine ecology.

“Indian Point is not only the most dangerous place in the New York metro area for people, it’s also the most dangerous place for our river creatures,” he noted.

“They suck (10 million kls) of water through that plant every day and destroy one billion fish and other river creatures each year. So that’s gone under the radar to a great extent.”

The Empire State Building viewed at night. Credit: NLNY/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

As usual, midtown Manhattan is packed with whisper-quiet cars and trams while thousands walk the streets listening to the birds of spring sing amongst the gleaming, grime-free skyscrapers in the crystal-clear morning air.

Welcome to New York City in April 2030.I think the public will be 100 percent behind this, if they know about it.

This is not a fantasy. It is a perfectly doable goal, said Stanford University energy expert Mark Jacobson. In fact, the entire state of New York could be powered by wind, water and sunlight based on a detailed plan Jacobson co-authored.

It’s not only doable, powering New York on green energy is “sustainable and inexpensive” and would save lives and health costs, Jacobson told IPS.

Each year, air pollution kills 4,000 people in New York State and costs the public 33 billion dollars in health costs, according to the study Jacobson co-authored with experts from all over the U.S. It will be published in the journal Energy Policy.

“Converting to wind, water and sunlight is feasible, will stabilise costs of energy and will produce jobs while reducing health and climate damage,” said Jacobson.

Under the plan, 40 percent of New York State’s energy would come from local wind power, 38 percent from local solar and the remainder from a combination of hydroelectric, geothermal, tidal and wave energy.

All vehicles would run on battery-electric power and/or hydrogen fuel cells. Heating and cooling for homes and businesses would come from air- and ground-source heat pumps, geothermal heat pumps, heat exchangers and backup electric resistance heaters – replacing natural gas and oil. Water heaters would be powered by the same heat pumps while solar hot water preheaters would provide hot water for homes.

High temperatures for industrial processes would be obtained with electricity and hydrogen combustion.

All of this can be accomplished with existing technology. The latest electric cars can travel 300 kilometres between charges, said Jacobson.

The significant costs of building renewable energy power plants, buying vehicles, heat pumps and other equipment are more than made up over time through savings in health costs and elimination of fuel costs by not having to buy any coal, oil or gas. The break-even point would be between 10 and 15 years, the study estimates.

The study also found that because green electricity is more efficient than burning fuels, New York’s end-use power demand would be 37 percent lower.

“Electric vehicles are five times more energy efficient than gasoline-powered cars and buses,” Jacobson said.

Electric vehicles convert 90 percent of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels while conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 20-25 percent, while the rest is lost as heat and noise. Coal and oil-fired electric power plants average just 33 percent efficiency and are major sources of air pollution and global warming.

Pollution costs from burning fossil fuels have largely been underestimated, according to new research. Canadian researchers found that the health cost to the public of driving a car or truck is 300 to 800 dollars per year per vehicle.

The public’s conception and official costs of pollution may be drastically undervalued, said Amir Hakami at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“While reducing emissions from vehicles and power plants is costly, not reducing emissions also costs money. Our research suggests that ignoring pollution will cost much more in the long term,” said Hakami in a statement.

When the sun doesn’t shine or wind doesn’t blow, there are many ways to match energy supply with demand, the study found. All electrical grids rely on a number of power sources and fossil-fuelled and nuclear power plants are taken off grid sometimes for months and years for repairs. Geographically-dispersed renewables can be networked with hydroelectric power to fill in remaining gaps. Energy can be also be stored in various ways including as heat, water pumped uphill, and batteries.

Improvements in energy efficiency would make New York’s conversion to 100 percent green energy easier, faster and less costly, Jacobson acknowledged.

Governments have invested very little in improving energy efficiency. The majority of research investment is devoted to generating more energy, said Charlie Wilson, a scientist with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenberg, Austria.

Creating a low-cost, high efficiency refrigerator would do much to reduce energy and reduce carbon emissions, Wilson said.

“There are also enormous energy savings potential in buildings,” Wilson told IPS.

But politicians don’t think building retrofits are sexy so public money goes into new power plants. The market won’t drive retrofits because the cost of energy is too low in most countries, he said.

Changing this won’t be easy. By far the world’s biggest corporations are the fossil fuel energy and power producers, who have enormous political influence, he said.

Leadership is needed to create a clean and healthy, pollution-free New York City by 2030, said Jacobson. “I think the public will be 100 percent behind this, if they know about it.”

“The economics of this plan make sense,” said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell engineering professor and a co-author of the study. “Now it is up to the political sphere.”

Peter “Pete” Seeger is a 93-year old U.S. folk legend who resides near Wappingers Falls in southern New York. He can be spotted occasionally on the traffic-heavy Route 9, flanked by world peace signs and armed with a banjo.

Activists behind a New York Police Department vehicle at an anti-fracking demonstration in Manhattan, New York City organized by CREDO Action and New Yorkers Against Fracking. The demonstration was aimed at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who was holding a policy summit in the New York Sheraton across the street. Credit: Adam Welz for CREDO Action/cc by 2.0

Seeger is famous for his protest songs – which tackle topics ranging from U.S. wars abroad to environmental degradation at home.

Last month, Seeger signed a letter – along with hundreds of health professionals and local organisations – addressed to Governor Andrew Cuomo, encouraging him to take into account “any and all public health impacts before deciding whether or not to allow fracking in New York”.

The letter – released to the public on Feb. 27 by Concerned Health Professionals of NY – warned of “public health consequences” that have emerged in neighbouring Pennsylvania, where fracking is allowed.

Formally termed “high pressure hydraulic fracturing”, fracking is a method used to capture natural gas from shale rocks. It requires horizontal drilling deep beneath the earth’s surface, then pressurising fluid to fracture shale rocks, which allows natural gas to escape.

According to the letter, health risks associated with fracking include hazardous air pollutants; improper disposal of radioactive wastewater; and climate-altering methane emissions.

“What they’re finding in Pennsylvania are people with rashes, nosebleeds, people with serious abdominal pain and so on,” said Sandra Steingraber, a distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College and founder of Concerned Health Professionals of NY.

“In general, we need better data on all this, and the problem is that fracking got rolled out across the landscape without any advanced health studies being done,” she told IPS.

On Mar. 6, the New York State Assembly voted to extend the moratorium on fracking until 2015, which would delay drilling for two more years and make way for new health assessments to be conducted.

The legislation must now pass through the state Senate and be approved by Cuomo if it is to take hold.

“This is the first time in my knowledge that the oil and gas industry (may be) stopped in its tracks because of unanswered questions about health,” said Steingraber.

U.S. energy trends

The decision in New York came at a time when natural gas is abundant in the U.S., at unprecedented levels, largely due to fracking.

But with increasing awareness of fracking’s potential side effects and the lack of regulations over the industry, a national opposition is growing as well.

“There are a couple of other states that have moratoriums: New Jersey has one, Maryland has one – and North Carolina is developing new rules on fracking,” said Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“Companies that aren’t highly regulated don’t have to prove anything, and therefore, data is not collected. So we don’t have the type of data (on fracking) that we might for another industry, because it has been so severely under-regulated,” she told IPS.

Part of the reason fracking rolled out with little oversight was due to the influence of powerful oil and gas industries in politics.

Michael T. Klare, director of the Five College Programme in Peace and World Security Studies at Hampshire College, told IPS, “The experience in Pennsylvania and elsewhere is that local people just get steamrollered by the oil companies and their lawyers and lobbyists.”

He said, “The biggest (player) is ExxonMobil, because they bought XTO (Energy), which was the biggest natural gas company using fracking… and they’ve been pushing (fracking) very hard. And other giant companies are in on the act.”

The U.S. energy mix

Proponents of fracking argue that natural gas is cleaner than coal, and could act as a bridge between fossil fuels and renewable energy.

However, “When you say bridge, people use it to mean different things. For example, how long a bridge, how wide a bridge, how high a bridge… it’s just a term that doesn’t have a lot of details,” said Mall of NRDC.

Klare, a defence correspondent at The Nation, warned, “Companies and utilities that might invest in renewable sources of energy are all rushing to convert their electricity generation to natural gas.

“These facilities will be in operation for decades to come, so there’s no sign that the country’s moving in the direction of renewable energy… It’s unclear where this bridge is leading to, except more gas,” he told IPS.

David G. Victor, a professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, noted that renewable technologies are currently unreliable, in terms of “keeping the lights on”.

“There’s a world of difference between some engineer thinking about a clever solution that works in the laboratory under ideal conditions, and then (using it in) actual power grids,” he said, arguing that they exist in small markets and depend too heavily on subsidies.

When asked about renewable energy, Klare agreed that they were in infant stages.

“Renewable energy is a much younger, newer kind of energy. Naturally, at this stage of its development, it’s less efficient and more expensive than oil and natural gas,” he said.

However, Klare argued that renewable energy deserves more government support, saying that this would be good for the U.S. in the long term.

“After all, oil has been around for 150 years, and natural gas has been around for 50 years or so. They’ve had more time; they’ve had a lot of government subsidies along the way and they still get government subsidies,” said Klare.

Mall of NRDC added that there is also a middle ground: “As long as we do need natural gas… There are much better ways to produce it, with much stronger protections and much cleaner methods than the industry is using now,” she said.

Mall cited ways to capture air pollutants, encase wastewater in steel tanks, use less toxic chemicals in fluids and keep fracking away from watersheds.

Health and community

Mall said, “Because of (U.S.) property laws, a lot of (homeowners) don’t own the oil and gas rights beneath their property. Therefore, they can’t stop (fracking) on their own land, and they’re not (fully) compensated for the damage to their own land.”

Steingraber, author of “Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment” (2010), added, “There are potential avenues of (chemical) exposure to people who didn’t consent to any of this.”

She noted that health problems associated with chemical exposure from fracking are expensive ones.

“We’re talking about preterm birth, which is the leading cause of infant mortality and the leading cause of disability (in the U.S.),” she said.

“Before we decide that fracking is this bonanza economically, providing royalty money and so on, we really need a full picture of the costs and benefits,” she argued.

“The job of government (is) to protect people from harm… whether that’s protecting us from some invading foreign army, or against chemicals others are putting into environments that get into our bodies,” she said.

Midtown New York skyline with the Empire State Building in the background (with electricity), in the foreground is Alphabet City and the East Village without power, Tuesday night, Oct. 30, 2012, after Hurricane Sandy. Credit: David Shankbone/cc y 2.0

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 18 2013 (IPS)

The “Spirit of America” is one of 10 ferries that carry passengers from Manhattan to Staten Island. Its keel – which lies on the bottom of the boat and carves through the waters of New York Harbour– was built with steel from the collapsed Twin Towers.  

While embarking, one can take in a panoramic view of some of New York’s diverse waterfronts: from the shores of Battery Park – the front lawn of Lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers – to the iconic Liberty and Ellis Islands, and to the industrial piers of Red Hook.

“New York City has more miles of waterfront than Seattle, San Francisco, Chicago and Portland combined,” said New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg at Brooklyn Bridge Park in March 2011, while unveiling a plan to make the city’s 837 kilometres of shoreline more resilient to climate change.Communities with lots of political power and influence are going to get resources...The question is, are we insuring that our most vulnerable communities are getting the same type of support, so they can recover from major storms like Sandy?

But atop the “Spirit of America”, a glance from one waterfront to the next presents a clear disparity in landscape and lifestyle.

According to a September 2012 New York Times article, the poorest one-fifth of New York City residents made 8,844 dollars in the previous year, while the richest one-fifth made 223,285 dollars. These figures rival income inequalities in the global south.

On Sep. 17, 2011, those who were critical of the economic system that gave way to such disparities touched off the Occupy Wall Street movement in Zucotti Park, in the Wall Street financial district in Lower Manhattan.

And when Hurricane Sandy swept through the waterfront on Oct. 29, 2012, its destruction was disproportionate as well.

A storm doesn’t discriminate, but people do

“A storm doesn’t discriminate where it hits based on race or class,” said Albert Huang, senior attorney in the Natural Resources Defence Council’s (NRDC) urban programme.

Even Wall Street was without power after Hurricane Sandy struck. Stores and restaurants were closed for days, traffic lights hung uselessly from their poles and subway entrances leading underground were as dark as caverns; similar plights were seen across New York’s five boroughs.

“Where we see the disparity, usually, is in the response to a disaster,” Huang told IPS.

According to Huang, neighbourhoods that suffered most during the aftermath of Sandy were low-income neighbourhoods, people of colour and elderly populations – many of whom live in public housing developments in places like Red Hook, the Far Rockaways and Coney Island.

These public housing developments, run by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), shelter five percent of the city’s population.

“Communities with lots of political power and influence are going to get resources. They’re going to get all these different kinds of amenities,” explained Huang, who coordinates the NRDC’s work on environmental justice.

“The question is, are we insuring that our most vulnerable communities are getting the same type of support, so they can recover from major storms like Sandy?”

Mold and moisture

Climate change and storm surges also exacerbate pre-existing mold and moisture problems in public housing, said Huang. According to a June 2011 report by the National Academy of Sciences, the build-up of mold and moisture in indoor environments contributes to health-related issues.

Mold and moisture is especially worrying in areas with already poor air quality, such as in East Harlem and the South Bronx, said Huang. Those neighbourhoods are surrounded by three highways and contain heavy air pollution. Their residents suffer from the highest levels of asthma in the country.

“(One) thing (a child) should have… is to come home and be able to breath inside your apartment. I mean, you already have a tough enough time breathing outside your apartment,” said Huang.

In NYCHA buildings, mold and moisture are worsened by broken pipes and leaking roofs. In January 2013, Bloomberg and NYCHA Chairman John Rhea announced a plan to address all 420,000 backlogged open repair work orders by the end of 2013.

But Huang worries that even if NYCHA does address all 420,000 work orders, it would not be enough.

“They show up with bleach and sponges and they wash off all the mold (from) the walls, (but) until you eliminate the moisture problems inside the walls, you’ll continue to have mold problems,” he explained.

“You can’t just do the cosmetic stuff,” he added.

SMIAs on the waterfront

Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (SMIAs) are characterised by New York City as places along the waterfront that contain dense clusters of industrial firms and water-dependent businesses; they were also designated in 1992 as areas to be protected and encouraged for continued use in this fashion.

When the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA) started mapping SMIAs onto designated storm surge protection zones, they noticed something quite worrisome.

“What we immediately realised was that every single one of these SMIAs were in storm surge zones”, said Eddie Bautista, executive director of NYC-EJA.

On top of that, NYC-EJA layered maps from all the public environmental databases they had access to – ranging from New York State superfund sites to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s toxic waste inventories – and they discovered troubling overlaps.

“There are only six of these SMIA communities in the city,” Bautista told IPS, listing them as the South Bronx, Sunset Park, Red Hook, Newton Creek, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the North Shore of Staten island.

“They are classic environmental justice communities,” he added.

Bautista cited a number of chemicals present in these areas, chemicals that the community would be exposed to during storm surges. They include trichloroethylene, which is a carcinogen; Naphthalene, which causes liver and kidney damage and harms eyesight; and N-hexane, which affects the brain.

“Half the businesses that were impacted by Sandy were industrial businesses,” he said. “For our communities, this presents a clear and pertinent danger.”

“We know that these (storms) are going to become more frequent and more intense,” he said. “If you know there are communities who, based on their profile, are vulnerable… to do nothing, to not act is an abdication of basic government responsibility.”

A few months ago, NYC-EJA proposed a series of recommendations to the city in order to make sure SMIA residents were aware that they lived in storm surge areas.

A plan was put forth, and a date had been set for voting in the city planning commission – Oct. 29, 2012.

But something else happened that day.

“Ironies abound, they had to cancel the hearing (for) the city’s coastal zone management plan because of a severe weather event and storm surges,” said Bautista.  “You can’t make this stuff up.”

New York Harbour is Lower Manhattan’s first line of defence against rising seas. Credit: George Gao/IPS

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Feb 11 2013 (IPS)

During World War II, a German U-boat made its way into New York Harbour. It fired two torpedoes at a British tanker, splitting the hull in three places and igniting it in flames. The captain and 35 members of his crew burned to death.

Seventy years later, New York Harbour is Lower Manhattan’s first line of defence against another threat: the rising tides of the sea.

New York is situated on three large islands, one peninsula and a collection of smaller islands. In this sense, rising sea levels and increasingly erratic storm surges has rendered it water-bound.

Flooded subway systems, large-scale power outages and flurrying toxic waste along the coast during the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy brought attention to the city’s floundering climate resiliency strategies.

New and re-emerging ideas to improve resiliency have varied in shapes and sizes. They include inflatable subway-tunnel plugs, large storm barriers off the coast, a series of artificial islands, and porous membranes that cling to and protect Manhattan buildings.

Five to six years ago, New York representatives approached Jeroen Aerts, a professor at the VU University Amsterdam’s Institute for Environmental Studies, for advice on storm surge protection.

“At that time, nobody was really interested in flood risk in New York. Mayor (Michael) Bloomberg was mainly focusing on sustainability issues,” he told IPS. “After Hurricane Irene (in 2011), they said, ‘well, maybe we have to look at other options, like storm surge barriers.’”

Aerts is currently conducting a cost-benefit analysis, weighing the price of constructing storm barriers against the price of upgrading current legislation – such as building regulations, zoning codes and flood insurance. “What we do is we compare both strategies as to how much they reduce flood risks,” he explained.

Asked if storm surge barriers are used in other cities, Aerts cited several in the Netherlands, and the Thames barrier in London. “There’s (also) a large one just being finalised in St. Petersburg in Russia,” he said.

“One condition is that they (remain) navigable, because New York is a port city,” said Aerts, explaining that vertical or rotating floodgates would allow tides and boats to pass unimpeded.

One variation consists of a northern barrier in the East River, coupled with a larger southern barrier that spans from Sandy Hook in New Jersey to Breezy Point in New York. “That one (would) cost 15-16 billion dollars,” he said.

Peter Stillman, a professor of political science and environmental studies at Vassar College, told IPS that storm surge barriers often raise environmental justice issues.

“Unless the surge hits the barrier straight on, some of the surge and its energy will travel along the barrier and hit the places where the barrier stops much harder,” he explained.

In this case, the Rockaways and parts of New Jersey would receive the brunt of future storm surges, he added.

Stillman said that there exist other strategies, which work to mimic how nature protects landscapes. He cited oyster beds, wetlands, and artificial islands and reefs.

Aerts argued that while there’s a need for green projects in the area, he worries it may not be enough to protect the city from future storm surges on par with Hurricane Sandy.

Aerts noted that, nonetheless, the debate surrounding storm surge barriers, along with the time needed for its design and construction, delays the city’s protection against storm surges for a few decades. “Meanwhile, you have to do something else, right?”

He advocated for updating policies and building codes to encourage the construction of more resilient buildings.

Working with nature

Kate Orff, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, told IPS, “The new frontier in infrastructure is not solely in hard, grey mono-functional infrastructure.

“What I’ve been calling for is a hybrid approach, which integrates some protective hard infrastructures,” she continued. “It’s a big picture look of regenerating the sort of ecological protective infrastructure that we used to have.”

Orff explained, “In many cases, we’ve decimated our inland islands with dredging, or we’ve collapsed our reefs through pollution or through over-harvesting… these are ecological infrastructures that were once in place that have been destroyed.”

One of Orff’s ideas is to nurture an oyster culture in the Bay Ridge Flats. The project, entitled “Oyster-tecture”, includes reefs – of oysters, mussels and eelgrass – that would attenuate waves and filter millions of gallons of New York Harbour water.

Oyster-tecture was inspired by Orff’s roots in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay, which “has a commitment to marine life and a functioning harbour – a harbour that is very active with boats and people and so on.

“But the key thing,” she said, “is that I’m sort of bringing this into a degraded urban condition, and trying to integrate it into, essentially, a new blue public-space system.”

According to a report by the NYS 2100 Commission – which was convened by Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, in response to Hurricane Sandy – NYC has lost 80 percent of its tidal wetlands and almost 200,000 acres of its oyster reefs.

Guy Nordenson, a professor of architecture and structural engineering at Princeton University and a member of the NYS 2100 Commission, told IPS, “I think some combination of engineered flood protection, offshore natural barriers, and onshore dunes and natural levees are necessary.”

The report also recommends further research into storm surge barriers, including its ecological effects – on aquatic life, on erosion, and on physical oceanographic conditions.

Adaptation mode

According to Aerts, people will continue moving into low-lying cities around the world. He estimated an additional one million people in New York City by 2040, even with foreboding storms.

“I don’t know any example of a city that retreated after a major event,” he said, with Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina (2005) in mind.

Stillman warned, “In a sense, we are in trouble in the greater New York-New Jersey area, because human beings have built homes – frequently expensive second homes… in areas that we are now learning (to be) very precarious in the case of storms.”

Orff, who is also the founding principal of SCAPE – a landscape architecture and urban design office, was slated to present at a Feb. 9 conference entitled “Waterproofing New York City”.

Ironically, the event was postponed when a winter storm covered the Northeast megalopolis in snow and flooded New York’s neighbouring coastlines.

On climate change, Orff told IPS, “We’re already in the mode of adaptation, which is simply assuming that our carbon dioxide emissions will be continuing to move exponentially upwards.

“What’s missing from the conversation is a discussion about carbon – carbon in cities and America’s carbon footprint,” she added.

Orff recalled her own experience during Hurricane Sandy: “I don’t think there’s anything like seeing water lapping at your feet on West End Avenue that provides a wakeup call. I can’t imagine what else could be more dramatic and focusing than water overtaking one of America’s celebrated international cities.”