Support for the New York State Climate Impacts Assessment

In 2020, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) decided to conduct a rigorous, comprehensive study of how climate change has affected or is projected to affect all sectors of New York’s economy and many aspects of daily life in the state. The study would also present strategies for how communities throughout the state can adapt, build resilience, and narrow the gaps that leave some residents disproportionately vulnerable to climate change impacts. NYSERDA wanted the study to be inclusive of diverse sources and perspectives, intentional about recognizing disparities and promoting equity and justice, and useful to state and local decision-makers, business owners, and households. To support the collaboration of academic institutions, science organizations, municipalities, community leaders, Indigenous communities, industry representatives, and New York State agencies and authorities that would develop the study, NYSERDA conducted a competitive solicitation process and selected ERG to provide contractor support.

Approximately 100 ERG staff spanning most of our service areas contributed to this project over its three-year lifespan. Early in the project, ERG recruited, convened, and facilitated external work groups of subject experts, practitioners, and others with valuable “lived experience” to create and inform the assessment. To help fulfil NYSERDA’s goals for the assessment, ERG ensured that these author teams were geographically, organizationally, and demographically diverse, and assembled around 160 “sector advisors” representing additional perspectives to provide guidance on the climate change-related experience, needs, and concerns of the sectors they represented.

The ERG team supported these author teams while also contributing its own research and writing, drawing from ERG expertise in all eight assessment sectors (agriculture, buildings, ecosystems, energy, human health and safety, society and economy, transportation, and water resources) plus the physical dimensions of climate change. During development, our team managed thousands of references and validated the accuracy of all citations in the assessment products. To ensure consistency and quality, we worked with the author teams to develop “traceable accounts” that rigorously documented the evidence for all key findings and assessed levels of confidence. We also coordinated revisions based on an independent peer review.

More than 80 authors contributed to the draft, which was more than 1,000 pages long. Working closely with the authors to ensure accuracy, ERG technical writers and editors synthesized and polished this initial content to develop a final assessment that was clear, well-organized, and stylistically consistent. ERG’s graphic designers created approximately 100 data visualizations while our digital solutions team designed and built the assessment website. NYSERDA released the full New York State Climate Impacts Assessment in February 2024, and the chapters have also been published in a special issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. In addition, ERG developed a wide variety of plain-language material for the website, summarizing key findings by sector, region, and climate hazard.