Resilient Cities, with Jainey Bavishi

Jainey Bavishi is the director of the New York City Mayor's Office of ​Climate Resiliency — overseeing more than $20 billion worth of investments to prepare New York City for the impacts of climate change. This includes bolstering the city’s coastline ​against coastal storms and high-tide flooding, preparing for intense rainstorms, and protecting New Yorkers against deadly heat waves. 

We met with Jainey the spring of 2021, well before the current hurricane season provided a dramatic demonstration for why these efforts are so critical to the city’s future. She brought us to the newly rebuilt boardwalk of Edgemere, an oceanfront community on the Rockaway peninsula, not far from JFK airport, in Queens. The Rockaways were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and Edgemere, whose very name means “at the sea’s edge,” is among the communities still grappling with the hard choices, presented by changing weather and rising sea levels.

Jainey got her start working on equitable disaster recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina, and went on to lead climate preparedness efforts for the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan. In 2017, she joined the de Blasio Administration to lead a team of urban planners, architects, engineers, lawyers, and policy experts who to develop ​science-based programs and policies that address impacts of climate change.

From heatwaves to hurricanes, flooding to FEMA grants, our conversation ranged through the myriad ways our communities will need to think differently about how we build for an ever-changing future. Jainey’s insights humanized and made tangible the profound social justice and economic impacts of climate change, and the complexity in designing an equitable recovery plan. Jainey was recently nominated by President Biden to a top leadership position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), and is awaiting Senate confirmation.