Tag: nature-based solutions

creativity

From Scenic Retreat to Stormwater Sponge: Inside Central Park’s $35 Million Flood Overhaul in NYC

Christa Avampato
Harlem Meer. Photo from Central Park Conservancy. https://www.centralparknyc.org/locations/harlem-meer

Standing near the edge of the Harlem Meer this week, NYC’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani framed an ambitious underground civil engineering project in an unexpected way. Evoking the animated lore of Avatar: The Last Airbender, he introduced the city’s newest infrastructure overhaul as an act of civic waterbending: steering the flow of water across urban landscapes to serve and protect neighborhoods rather than swamp them with flood waters during storms.

For over 160 years, New Yorkers have seen Central Park as a scenic sanctuary—a place to wander wooded trails, watch seasonal and resident birds drift across calm ponds and soar from tree to tree, and take refuge from the city’s busyness.

Yet behind that tranquil landscape lies an ongoing operational dilemma:

  1. To keep the north end water bodies full during dry spells, the city continually pumps in roughly 175 million gallons of municipal drinking water every year.
  2. When severe storms hit, heavy runoff cascades off park terrain and adjacent streets, overwhelming local storm sewers and forcing floodwaters into basements, subway entrances, and avenues across Central and East Harlem.

The newly launched $35.7 million North End Recirculation Project transforms this 19th-century scenic retreat into an active, protective stormwater sponge.

The Unseen Problem: Drinking Water In, Storm Sewage Out

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux shaped the northern park waterways between 1862 and 1865, creating three interconnected bodies of water: The Pool, The Loch, and The Harlem Meer.

While these ponds look natural, their levels are maintained by the city. Every year, Central Park draws an estimated 175 million gallons of clean municipal drinking water simply to keep those ponds replenished.

Meanwhile, extreme rainfall events are increasing across New York City. The surrounding combined sewers can’t manage that sudden deluge. Runoff rapidly fills the Meer to capacity, backing up local drainage lines and forcing sewage-laden water into street intersections and ground-floor homes along the park’s boundaries.

Treating park water bodies purely as decorative scenery wastes clean drinking water during heatwaves and floods neighbors during storms.

How Central Park Acts as a Living Sponge Works

Rather than excavating massive subterranean concrete holds, the project uses the natural slope of Olmsted’s original layout across a 204-acre watershed.

  • Closed-Loop Recirculation: During dry periods, water from the Harlem Meer is continuously pumped back up to the top of The Pool, flowing downhill by gravity through The Loch and back into the Meer. Natural filtration keeps the water clean and circulating, eliminating the need to top off the ponds with city tap water.
  • Protective Catchment: When meteorologists forecast a heavy storm, park managers will lower the water level of the Harlem Meer in advance so it can take on the extra water and keep it in the park rather than flood the surrounding streets.
  • The Neighborhood Benefit: By temporarily draining part of the Meer, the city creates a vast empty space right before the storm. Rainwater from park hills and surrounding streets surges naturally into the Meer instead of rushing into neighborhood storm drains.

Once the storm passes, the captured water is filtered and recirculated, keeping 132 million gallons of stormwater out of neighborhood sewers every year—a massive 90% drop in sewer runoff from this watershed.

Environmental Justice at the Park Boundaries

Resilience infrastructure must protect the communities that face the greatest risk.

For years, East Harlem residents and advocates from organizations like WE ACT for Environmental Justice have highlighted how low-lying northern Manhattan streets bear the brunt of storm waters. Basement apartments flood, street corners become like impassable lakes, and sewer overflows dump untreated waste into open waterways and onto the streets.

By reimagining Central Park not just as a respite (which it certainly is!), but also as protective green infrastructure for Central and East Harlem, this project proves that green spaces can do the heavy lifting to help people as climate change intensifies.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Every public green space can play an active defensive role against extreme weather.

  • Rethink Decorative Water: Examine ponds and decorative fountains in your neighborhood. Advocate for retrofits that replace tap-water top-offs with recirculating, naturally filtered systems.
  • Demand Dynamic Infrastructure: Storage basins should not sit full during storms. Urge city managers to install smart valves and retention ponds that empty ahead of storms to catch neighborhood runoff.
  • Connect Park Boundaries to Community Needs: Beautiful parks should never be disconnected from the streets around them. Ensure public investments protect adjacent neighborhoods from runoff and sewer back-ups.

When we turn greenspaces into allies and collaborators, we save our drinking water, protect homes and businesses, and maintain the health of all beings who live in our communities.

creativity

A Healing Touch: How Healthy Corals Reached Out to Save Bleached Corals

Christa Avampato
Coral Reef. Photo by Shaun Low on Unsplash

We know how good it feels to get a hug from our loved ones. Science has shown that physical touch is vital for human health. For infants, a lack of regular physical contact, cuddling, and responsive care disrupts core physiological, hormonal, and neurological development. It turns out that on coral reefs, a healing touch can restore health, too.

When ocean temperatures spike, coral reefs across the globe experience sudden trauma and expel the microscopic, colorful algae living inside their tissues that supply up to 90% of the coral’s daily food through photosynthesis. Without them, the coral bleaches, starves, and often dies within weeks.

We’ve long believed bleached corals are a lost cause. A recent accidental laboratory discovery shattered that assumption. It turns out that healthy corals can resuscitate their bleached family members.

An Accidental Tumble in a Stanford Lab

The breakthrough began not with complex computer models, but with a physical accident in a laboratory at Stanford University.

Marine ecologist Steve Palumbi noticed that two small finger-coral fragments in an aquarium tank in his Stanford University lab had toppled over and landed against each other. One fragment was healthy; the family member of that coral was bleached.

Where they pressed together, Palumbi spotted something startling: a thin band of vibrant color was creeping across the bleached coral’s pale tissue. The healthy coral was quite literally giving their coral relative life.

Researcher Daniel Collins set up a simple experiment to test what happened:

  • He took pairs of genetically identical coral clones—one bleached, one healthy.
  • In five tanks, he placed the pairs directly in physical contact.
  • In five matching control tanks, he set the pairs apart without touching.

The results arrived with stunning clarity.

Every coral pair placed in physical contact thrived within days. The healthy partner acted as a living bridge, funneling microscopic algae directly into their starving relative. Within seven weeks, all five touching corals regained full color, rebuilt their algal populations, and made a complete recovery.

In the control tanks, every isolated coral died. Proximity alone did nothing. Physical contact between relatives made all the difference.

Nature’s Living Pipeline

Corals might look like colorful ocean rocks, but they are colonies of tiny soft animals building shared homes. When two fragments share the same DNA, their immune systems recognize family rather than an invading enemy. The healthy coral pumps life-giving tenants to their relative, giving emergency care.

This simple mechanism challenges how we think about ecological recovery. We often picture resilience as an individual trait—a single tough organism weathering a storm alone. Here, survival depends entirely on direct, physical connection. Communing is a matter of life and death.

Practical Hope for Global Reef Restoration

Ocean warming caused by climate change remains the single greatest threat to marine ecosystems. This discovery of coral touch gives restoration teams a powerful, low-cost tool.

  • Reimagining Coral Nurseries: Reef restoration groups often grow coral fragments on underwater ropes or metal frames with wide gaps between them to prevent competition. Grouping genetic twins together so they can touch could create built-in mutual support systems when temperatures rise.
  • Rapid Response Triage: Rather than waiting months for bleached wild reefs to slowly absorb free algae from murky waters, divers could actively graft healthy nursery clones onto bleached colonies immediately after heatwaves pass, jumpstarting recovery by months.
  • Accessible Conservation: This technique requires no expensive machinery, chemical injections, or proprietary technology. It relies solely on understanding natural behavior and arranging related living organisms with intention.

The Togetherhood Takeaway

Nature repeatedly solves existential crises through cooperation rather than isolation.

  • Look for Simple Physical Bridges: The most durable resilience solutions often look less like high-tech interventions and more like thoughtful, natural arrangements.
  • Prioritize Direct Connection: Whether designing community shade canopies, restoring salt marsh shorelines, or nurturing neighborhood ecosystems, survival increases when individual pieces link into a shared network to help one another.
  • Stay Open to Accidental Clues: Breakthroughs often hide in plain sight when experiments do not go according to plan. Keen observation of living systems reveals pathways that theory sometimes overlooks or simply never considered.

When healthy living beings reach out and link arms with those in need, recovery begins and restoration can happen at speeds once thought impossible. It’s true for related corals, and it’s true for us, too.

creativity

Copenhagen: From Concrete Jungle to Sponge City 🌊

Christa Avampato
Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

Copenhagen, the vibrant capital of Denmark, is renowned for its design, cycling culture, and high quality of life. But beneath the charming canals and green spaces, a pressing challenge looms: managing increasingly intense rainfall due to climate change. Rather than relying solely on traditional infrastructure like pipes and sewers, Copenhagen is embracing nature-based solutions, transforming itself into a “sponge city.”

The sponge city concept, originating in China, focuses on absorbing and retaining rainwater where it falls, mimicking how nature manages water. This involves integrating nature-based solutions into the urban landscape to capture, filter, and slowly release stormwater to mitigate flooding.

“If you want to survive, you have to be spongy,” says Yu Kongjian, dean of Peking University’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and founder of Turenscape, one of China’s largest landscape architecture firms. “Trying to protect cities with hard, gray infrastructure made of concrete is doomed to fail.”

Copenhagen is a frontrunner in the spongey revolution, and its journey offers valuable lessons for cities worldwide grappling with similar climate-related challenges. My dear archipelago home city of New York, I’m looking at you!

One of the key elements of Copenhagen’s sponge city transformation is the creation of what’s known as green infrastructure. Parks and green spaces are being redesigned to function as rainwater retention basins during heavy downpours. These areas, often featuring sunken lawns and permeable surfaces, can temporarily store significant volumes of water, reducing the strain on the city’s human-made drainage system and reducing the risk of flooding. For example, Enghaveparken has been renovated to include a large underground reservoir capable of holding approximately 22,700 cubic meters of water. This dual-purpose space serves as a recreational area for residents while providing crucial stormwater management capacity.

Beyond parks, Copenhagen is incorporating blue infrastructure into its urban fabric, giving water a place to flow. The city’s numerous canals and harbors are being leveraged to manage excess water. Innovative solutions like floating wetlands and constructed ponds not only enhance biodiversity but also help to filter and retain stormwater. Furthermore, permeable pavements are being increasingly adopted in streets and public squares, allowing rainwater to seep into the ground rather than running off into drains. This reduces surface runoff and helps to replenish groundwater levels.

The driving force behind Copenhagen’s commitment to becoming a sponge city is its ambitious Cloudburst Management Plan, developed after a severe storm in 2011 caused widespread flooding. This comprehensive plan outlines a series of long-term projects aimed at making the city more resilient to extreme weather events. It emphasizes a collaborative approach involving the municipality, utility companies, businesses, and citizens in implementing nature-based solutions across the urban landscape.

The benefits of Copenhagen’s sponge city approach are manifold. Beyond reducing flood risk and alleviating pressure on drainage systems, these green and blue infrastructure initiatives enhance the city’s livability. They create more green spaces for recreation, improve air quality, support biodiversity, and even help to cool urban heat islands during hot summer months.

Copenhagen’s journey to becoming a sponge city is not without its challenges. Retrofitting existing urban areas with green and blue infrastructure requires careful planning, investment, and community engagement. However, the city’s proactive and integrated approach serves as an inspiring model for how other cities can adapt to the increasing impacts of climate change by working with nature, rather than against it. As extreme weather events become more frequent, the lessons learned in Copenhagen offer valuable insights for building more resilient and sustainable cities for the future.

You can read more about Copenhagen’s plans to manage climate change at https://urbandevelopmentcph.kk.dk/climate.

creativity

What the Pope got wrong about climate change

Christa Avampato
Photo by Imat Bagja Gumilar on Unsplash

Last month, a study on conservation actions, including protected areas and management, showed they effectively halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and reducing climate change impacts. Over the weekend, CBS aired an interview with Pope Francis, the first he’s granted to a major U.S. television network. About climate change he told Norah O’Donnell, “Unfortunately, we have gotten to a point of no return.” What’s unfortunate is Norah O’Donnell didn’t explain the science that this is not true. We are not at a point of no return with climate change. We need to do more and faster, and there is hope.

I understand it’s probably intimidating to challenge the Pope during an interview on national television. However, what he says is taken as truth by millions of people. If he pointed to the many success cases we have, this would inspire the increase in climate action we need. People need to know they can and do have the opportunity right now to make a difference. We have to spread this message far and wide because time is running out. This next decade could turn the tide one way or the other, and we have the chance to be part of the solution.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it. It’s documented that 44,000 species are at risk of extinction. If these extinctions happen, ecosystems will collapse and billions of people will struggle to have enough food, clean water, livelihoods such as fishing, homes, and cultural preservation, to name just a few of the severe impacts.

Re:wild is an incredible resource filled with hope and success stories backed by science. One of their recent article hit home for me because of my passion for nature-based solutions and rewilding: We don’t need to reinvent the planet; we need to rewild it.

The world’s forests store approximately 861 gigatonnes of carbon, equivalent to nearly a century’s worth of current annual fossil fuel emissions. Tropical rainforests store 50 percent of that. These forests are not just the trees – they’re a whole ecosystem including the fungi, soil, insects, and predators. “When there are pieces of that biodiversity missing, the carbon cycle is incomplete or much less efficient than it would be otherwise,” said Christopher Jordan, Re:wild Latin America director. Storing carbon and keeping it out of the atmosphere needs all parts of the forest. It needs biodiversity. The wild, not human-invented technology, is the most effective solution to the interconnected climate, biodiversity, and human well-being crises. 

This is what I wish the Pope had said about climate change because it’s true: There is hope. We have the solutions. Now, we need the will and humility to listen to nature and let her lead for our own sake and hers. We are all interconnected. We need each other.