BCEQ Panel Pushes Nature-Based Climate Solutions for NYC

As extreme weather events become increasingly relentless, the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, BCEQ, marked Climate Week NYC 2025 with a panel focused on reshaping how the city prepares for the future.

On Sept 26., officials from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, as well as the Department of Environmental Protection, DEP, led a forum in Van Cortlandt Park. At the heart of the discussion was an urgent need to combat growing threats of climate change with low-cost, nature-based solutions.

Expanding tree canopies and restoring wetlands, panelists argued, can be lifelines for areas hardest hit by severe heat and flooding.  In New York City, heat-related deaths disproportionately affect predominantly Black and low-income communities, with parts of the South Bronx being particularly at risk.

Angela Licata, DEP’s deputy commissioner of sustainability, said the mounting unpredictability of climate events is why the agency’s old weather planning models are no longer reliable. 

“In the past, DEP engineers would look at the historical record,” she said. “They would look back 50, 100 years, take averages, look at the most extreme events and believe that would represent what we would see in the future. [Now,] we have to weigh the more recent events much more heavily.”

In 2024, the city issued its first drought warning in two decades. This year followed the trend as rainfall plunged 40 percent below average during the driest summer in 25 years. 

Weeks later, flash floods in August and September brought the second-wettest hour of rainfall in half a century.

 “This variability is something that has us very concerned and has us really paying very close attention,” Licata said.

Former Parks First Deputy Commissioner Liam Kavanagh noted that natural defenses are efficient in mitigating the severity of weather events and must be treated as essential infrastructure. New York City’s street trees, he noted, intercept 1.3 billion gallons of stormwater a year. 

It’s all part of a push for more green infrastructure — systems that capture stormwater that concrete and other impermeable surfaces cannot. 

“Unlike roads or bridges, green infrastructure does not have a permanent funding stream,” Kavanagh said. “So while we spend billions of dollars on bridges and tunnels, we don’t have a similar system to support trees or wetlands. But the benefits are very real.”

Wetlands, often overlooked, offer immense protection. By slowing water, their roots and soils filter pollutants and create habitats that cool neighborhoods and stabilize ecosystems.

At Van Cortlandt Lake, this philosophy has already been put into practice in a pilot living shoreline project. Using a solar-powered pump that diverts incoming water, such as that from the Major Deegan Expressway just up the hill, into a 160-foot channel that is planted with cattails and sedges. 

Among those spearheading the project is environmental engineer Paul Mankiewicz.

“If anybody wants to know how to clean the water on the planet, there’s already a 450-million-year-old mechanism,” he said. “The soil root system will pull out all the bacteria, all nitrogen, all the phosphorus and keep it on land instead of .. in the water.”

After the panel, Mankiewicz and DEP’s Director of Ecological Services, John McLaughlin, led attendees on a tour of the living shoreline located near the Van Cortlandt Golf Lake House.

“Paul envisioned taking lake water, putting it through a wetland system [and] treating it,” McLaughlin said. “It’s all about scale. We’re not saying this little wetland system is going to clean the entire lake, but the principle is putting it through a wetland system.”

The project is less about cleaning one lake and more about proving that wetlands can be engineered to perform the work of costly infrastructure while adding ecological benefits. 

Dozens of similar systems, Mankiewicz and McLaughlin added, could be placed across the city’s 500 miles of shoreline to reduce flooding, filter stormwater and temper heat.

Green infrastructure can lower surface temperatures by more than 10 degrees on the hottest days, providing relief in neighborhoods most vulnerable to heat waves.

That need for cooling power is becoming increasingly urgent.  Parks Commissioner Iris Rodriguez-Rosa said extreme heat already kills more than 500 New Yorkers each year, a toll expected to rise sharply as summers grow hotter and longer. 

“Our new strategy ensures that every neighborhood in the city will be scheduled for reliable and regular improvements,” she said.