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New York City comptroller Brad Lander just unveiled a new tool that will help New Yorkers understand how close the city is to its climate goals. Just in time for Earth Week (this week!), the NYC Climate Dashboard, as the online release is dubbed, analyzes a slew of metrics, including energy transition, emissions, pension fun investments, maps of coastal flooding, resiliency infrastructure and more.
"Climate change is this century’s most pressing crisis and most urgent opportunity. Protecting our city from rising sea levels, devastating flash flooding, and deadly heat waves requires government, businesses, property owners, financial institutions and everyday New Yorkers working strategically to hit ambitious, but achievable goals," Lander said in an official statement. "The NYC Climate Dashboard will track our collective efforts to drastically reduce our emissions, convert to 100% clean energy, make a just transition to a green economy and adapt our infrastructure to protect New Yorkers."
Given the fact that, according to scientists, NYC risks to witness double the amount of dangerous heat waves, flash flooding and extreme precipitation in the coming decades, being able to assess where we stand in the fight against climate change is of utmost importance—and entirely part of the comptroller's job, who effectively functions as New York's chief fiscal officer and is tasked to manage a variety of risks facing the city, from climate crisis to financial issues and everything in-between.
There are a lot of aspects to the story that the dashboard analyzes, but some key data include the fact that NYC has reduced emissions by 25 percent since 2005 and has set up a goal to reduce them by 80 percent of those 2005 levels by 2050. Also: less than 1 percent of vehicles registered in NYC are electric, although the current 630 charging stations peppered around town do bring us over halfway to an initial target of 1,000 charging points by 2025.
A mere look through the dashboard, which you can find right here, will make it clear that, although we've certainly taken steps forward to deal with important, climate-related issues, we're still a long way to go to actually make a difference in the grand scheme of things. Here's to hoping that this new dashboard will help us get there.
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