The New York City Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists that has been modeling how climate change will affect the New York City region has, for the first time, come out with sea level rise projections for the year 2100. (Previous reports only envisioned scenarios for the 2050s and 2080s.)
The very long-term forecast: 1 to 6 feet of sea level rise, with most models pointing to a rise that falls midrange.
The city, however, is NOT planning on changing its building code any time soon.
Dan Zarrilli, the director of the Mayor's Office of Recovery and Resiliency, said today's buildings would likely be replaced by more modern ones before the higher sea levels were reached.
"Buildings that are built today have a life span that is perhaps shorter than that 100-year mark," Zarrilli said. "It's probably not appropriate to say, 'There's a very small chance at the high end of the projections that there's 6 feet of sea level rise, so let's build 6 feet higher.' I think you run out of money really fast doing that anyway."
However, figures from NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy indicate that nearly 1.8 million housing units built before 1940 were still in the city's housing stock as of 2012. That makes them 72 years old. No figures were available for how many buildings are over 100 years old.
Right now, the city requires new residential buildings to place their first inhabited floor 2 feet higher than the level projected by the preliminary 100-year flood plain proposed last year by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some assets, such as sewage treatment plants, are being retrofitted to slightly higher standards. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's post-Sandy report, "A Stronger, More Resilient New York" calls for the city to review those standards again in 2025 and increase them if actual sea levels rise faster than the short-term projections by the climate change panel.
The paper also projects that the mean annual temperature will likely increase between 5.3 and 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s, and the mean annual precipitation will increase by 5 to 13 percent over the same time period.