On August 7, a diverse group of practitioners, activists and business and community leaders gathered for “Climate and Environmental Justice in Harlem: A Discussion of New York City’s Plans.” Sponsored by the Columbia Climate School and the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, the event featured a wide-ranging discussion about how climate change and polluting industries impact the health and well-being of disadvantaged communities, and what is being done to address the disproportionate environmental burden borne by marginalized neighborhoods in New York City.
Video and selected excerpts from the event appear below, and comments have been edited for clarity. Information about the panelists appear at the bottom of this page.
“Climate and Environmental Justice in Harlem” took place as part of Harlem Week 2024: Celebrate the Journey, the 50th year of the annual community celebration. The first Harlem Day took place in the summer of 1974 with the objective of bringing a “positive vibe” to the greater Harlem community’s residents, businesses and cultural institutions during a difficult economic and social period in New York City. Learn more about Harlem Week.
Harlem and New York City
“The Office of Climate and Environmental Justice is the first mayor’s office in New York City to actually have environmental justice within its title… It’s been incredible to come into this office and really see how to operationalize something like environmental justice within a mayor’s office. One of the things we were able to do with city council is pass a series of local laws that required the city to produce an environmental justice report. This report [EJNYC Report], which we did with [environmental justice nonprofit] We Act, is really a landmark, first-of-its-kind documentation of the historic burdens and benefits that we New Yorkers experience across New York City. Something like this really hasn’t been done before at this scale.” – Elijah Hutchinson, executive director, Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice
“One of the biggest, nation-leading rules that NYC now has is Local Law 97, which is going to require every property in New York City that’s over 50,000 square feet to do energy efficiency upgrades… And that is part of a broader strategy for the city as a whole. This city is going completely carbon neutral by 2050. We’re going 100% renewable by 2040. And we’re halving our transportation emissions by 2030 in the transportation sector. Those are really, really ambitious targets, and we have to do a whole lot more work to get there.” – Elijah Hutchinson
Climate and Health
“Earlier we were saying this is the hottest year. I also like to think of this as this is the coolest year that we will be experiencing because every year in the future, we expect to be hotter, which is concerning because heat is the biggest killer of New Yorkers and especially black and brown New Yorkers. On average, we experience about 350 heat-related deaths a year in New York City—that’s more than all of our other climate hazards combined.” – Elijah Hutchinson
“East Harlem, whose census tracts are largely in environmental justice areas, has the highest rate of adult emergency room visits attributed to pm 2.5 [tiny particulates produced by combustion] per 1,000 residents for all New York City neighborhoods. This is about triple the citywide average. Long-term exposure to pm 2.5 across New York City as a whole contributes to around 2,000 excess deaths per year.” – Elijah Hutchinson
The Built Environment
“Peaker power plants are located in environmental justice communities. This is very clear. If you look at a map of New York City, the areas where we have our energy infrastructure, our polluting infrastructure are usually located in areas that are environmental justice communities. We have to do everything we can to decommission and shut down those plants and convert to renewable energy so that those benefits can be realized in EJ communities.” – Elijah Hutchinson
“Trees do so much. Not only do they provide shade, they capture water. They add biodiversity. Right now, we’ve hit a record with tree planting in New York City. We planted more trees this year than in the last eight years—18,000 trees across the city. We’re committed [with the NYC Parks Department] to planting a tree in every spot we possibly can in all of the neighborhoods across New York City that are experiencing high heat vulnerability. And we’re launching an urban forest master plan for all of New York so that at least 30% of the city is covered in trees. That work is going to be done with a coalition of partners that are in the open space, green space and community-based organization world.” – Elijah Hutchinson
Community and Activism
“The impacts that Harlem and the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn experience are not just heat and flooding and climate impacts—they actually intersect with a number of other challenges that these communities face. The quality of their housing, lack of jobs… We know from academic studies that formerly redlined communities in every city across the country are many degrees warmer during heat waves than communities that were not redlined. We also know from studies that those communities have much of the same demographics that they did in the 1940s, when the federal government drew a line around these communities, denied them mortgages and paved the way for decades of disinvestment.” – Sheila Foster, professor of climate, Columbia Climate School.
“Medgar Evers College was birthed out of the Central Brooklyn community, with social justice in its DNA. It was named for Medgar Wiley Evers, who gave his life, slain in his driveway by an assassin’s bullet from the Ku Klux Klan, with his family right there in the house waiting for him to come in. And he was slain because he was a social justice advocate trying to assist in getting the right to do what? To vote. And here we are in 2024. And we are fighting for the same right. And so I would say it is no surprise that, in America, environmental insults happen mostly in black and brown communities.” – Patricia Ramsey, president, Medgar Evers College
Economics
“NYC government is coordinating with private businesses on the workforce development and green jobs side—especially investments in offshore wind and new sectors that will support the green energy transition. We’ve invested over $100 million in new innovation hubs in Sunset Park, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and establishing a new climate exchange on Governors Island, just to name a few. We’re looking to spur innovation in small businesses as well, to support that entire ecosystem. We’ll have 400,000 green jobs in New York soon—that’s a significant percentage of our GDP. The important part is connecting those jobs to people and the communities that have been impacted most by these harms.” – Elijah Hutchinson
“For people living on the fence line with gas, oil and power plants, progress is not going to be fast enough, if ever… There are policies like Justice 40 that say, hey, 40% of the benefits [should go to EJ communities], but how do we make that real? We really need an academic institution to track, document and compare with what the administration says… accountability is still an issue.” – Peggy Shepard
Big Ideas
“A number of years ago, when I was a young professor, I remember teaching this biology lab. And I had read this biology book—I don’t recall the name—that talked about going into space. All of you know that when astronauts go into space and they have to stay up there for a while, they have to take some things with them. What are some of the things they have to bring? Water and food. Can they stay up there as long as they want to? No. Why? Limited oxygen. The supplies are going to run out. And so, the book said, let’s think about Earth like it’s a spaceship. And when I did that, it helped our students who were non-science majors visualize that there is no guarantee [such resources] are going to be here if we continue to abuse them.” – Patricia Ramsey
“I’d like you all to listen to this quote: If you want to learn about the health of a population, look at the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the places where they live. Now can you believe that was observed by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC? Yet these issues remain front and center to our health and our well-being.” – Peggy Shepard
Panelists
Curtis Archer, president, Harlem Community Development Corporation
Sheila Foster, J.D., is a professor of climate at the Columbia Climate School. Foster is a leading scholar of environmental and climate justice. Her research spans a broad range of topics, including innovative resource governance regimes, land use policy, and the role of subnational governments and local leaders in addressing cross-border
challenges such as climate change.
Elijah Hutchinson, executive director, Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice
Patricia Ramsey was appointed the sixth president of Medgar Evers College by the City University of New York Board of Trustees. Ramsey, who officially took office on May 1, 2021, is the first woman and the first scientist to serve as president of the College.
Peggy Shepard is co-founder and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice and has a long history of organizing and engaging northern Manhattan residents in community-based planning and campaigns to address environmental protection and environmental health policy locally and nationally.
Daniel Zarrilli is the first-ever chief climate and sustainability officer at Columbia University where he is leading and coordinating the university’s wide-ranging efforts to achieve its climate commitments and related sustainability goals.
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