Resilient Coastal Communities and Climate Adaptation: Lessons from New York for New Zealand

credit: National Environmental Education Week

Aya Morris spent six months in New York City as a Fulbright New Zealand science and innovation graduate student, but she's now back home in New Zealand and ready to share some of her experiences.

As part of the Resilient Coastal Communities Project, she's been working with the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and Columbia Climate School's Center for Sustainable Urban Development on a project to address flood risk in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area, and she's written about her experience on Medium.

"All areas within New Zealand have a high proportion of coastline to land area, and for my home in the subtropical Far North'a long, narrow peninsula' this is especially true,'" she writes.

"Nature-based solutions, rather than gray infrastructure, are gaining increasing recognition for their potential to provide more sustainable and more affordable long-term adaptation for floods and climate change, while delivering better water quality outcomes."

One of those nature-based solutions she's been impressed with: living reefs.

She writes that she's been able to visit many M'ori communities along New Zealand's coast, "where many indigenous M'ori communities are on the front line of the climate crisis," and see first-hand how they've...

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