Introduction: Superstorm Sandy

On the night of October 29, 2012, Superstorm Sandy was everywhere. I had a hard time keeping my eyes off the TV, flipping back and forth between the Weather Channel and CNN's beachfront reporters, who were on the verge of being blown over or swept away by water. I was also getting first-hand reports of the flooding in lower Manhattan. At the time, I was the U.S. company lead for Louis Berger, the global professional services firm that is now part of WSP. Louis Berger was responsible for managing the Downtown Recovery Program where rebuilding work at the World Trade Center site was continuing over a decade after the September 11 terrorist attacks. That job had expanded my environment and sustainability technical focus to include disaster management, of which Superstorm Sandy would become an extreme example. The wall of water that was pushing in from the mouth of New York Harbor was threatening all the progress that had been made at the site.

Sandy also hit closer to home. Right outside my window, trees were bent parallel to the ground in 70-mph blasts of wind. My family lived in a small town in New Jersey, just outside New York City-and directly in Sandy's path. By midnight, the gusts weakened to 50 miles an hour, but it took me another two hours to finally crawl into bed. It was a short night's sleep.

At approximately 4:00 a.m., an employee of New York City's Department of Citywide Administrative Services called my cell phone. He thanked me for picking up before moving straight into his early-morning pitch. "I'm making all kinds of calls because we need heroes right now. I'm having a hard time finding heroes. I'm hoping Louis Berger can be a hero."

"Absolutely," I said, walking out into the hallway. The wind was still hammering the south side of my house. "What do you need?"

"Everything."

"Let's start with the priorities," I said.

"We need pumps. We need generators. We need fuel. We need trucks. Whatever you can get me, I'm pretty sure I'll take it."

I was full of adrenaline as I marshalled together the initial equipment supply with my emergency management team. Over the next few days, I dove into the seemingly endless additional requests for emergency response support and materials coming our way. At the same time, our house had no power except a small gasoline-powered generator, so I was taking calls in my car with the phone plugged into the cigarette lighter.

Outside, the neighborhood had been transformed into a surreal landscape of downed powerlines and toppled trees. On Halloween, two days after the storm blew through, I drove across my neighbor's front lawn to get out to the main road and buy gas for our generator-it was the only way to get around the debris blocking the street. Once I got onto major roads, I searched for gas stations that still had fuel, but they often had hours-long wait times.

Yet, even as I drove past the wreckage around me, I knew we were lucky. We were alive-the storm killed close to 100 people in New Jersey and New York alone-and in a relatively undamaged house. Thirty miles away in Queens, a whole neighborhood had been inundated by flooding and then, after a flood-related electrical accident, burned to the ground. Down at the Jersey Shore, houses in expensive beachfront communities collapsed into the sand, while the streets surrounding them were reclaimed by the ocean. In just a few hours, one of the wealthiest parts of one of the wealthiest countries in the world had been devastated and humbled. It was clear that we needed to do better, and my career and business focus expanded again to include a stronger and more direct blending of climate resilience and sustainability.

Arguably, 2005's Hurricane Katrina should have been the definitive wake-up call across the United States about the urgent necessity of building more resilient and sustainable infrastructure. The event's sobering death toll, around 1,800 people, the widely criticized local, state, and federal response, and the horrible inequity in who suffered the most-like many disasters, a disproportionate number of the dead were poor, Black, and elderly-were all shocking. I saw the inordinate toll on already underserved communities from the storm's damage and the subsequent, lagging rebuilding efforts first-hand in 2007, when I spent time in New Orleans supporting the long-term recovery. But for many people-and I was one of them-it was also easy to put a few asterisks next to Hurricane Katrina's impact. Unlike New Orleans, most U.S. cities don't sit on the hurricane-heavy Gulf of Mexico, surrounded by water, below sea level (and sinking), and reliant on an extensive system of pump stations and levies to stay dry and habitable.

In that sense, Sandy was different. First, it made climate change very personal to me by putting family at risk. But, more broadly, it was irrefutable evidence of how much more of the United States was at risk. If New York City could effectively be paralyzed for weeks, nowhere along the densely populated East Coast of the United States could be considered safe. However, by the time Sandy hit in 2012, the science on climate change was unequivocal and the risk increasingly clear. Over 90% of climate scientists agreed that the planet was warming in an unprecedented way, the warming was largely driven by human activity, and the changing climate was driving more extreme weather. Thousands of scientists around the world contribute to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) climate modeling, but the basic dynamic behind global warming is high school physics. Putting more heat in the atmosphere and oceans means they also contain more energy. This additional energy will, in turn, be released in larger and more anomalous storms and other climatic deviations from what used to be considered normal.

Predicting exactly what types of weather events global warming will produce is trickier. No single event can be ascribed to climate change. In fact, explaining any one weather event at all is complicated since they are all the result of numerous, complex interrelated dynamics acting across a spatiotemporal scale. However, we do know what kind of storms will be more frequent and severe as a result of climate change. Sandy, an extreme storm and huge flooding event, fit that profile-we'll dig into some specific details later.

However, for anyone waffling on whether climate change was "their problem," getting walloped by Sandy put an exclamation mark on it. The extreme weather predicted in the relatively dry and dense IPCC reports that span thousands of pages is happening now. Sandy gave the New York metro area a peek into what life in the era of climate change looks like-flooded subway tunnels, destroyed neighborhoods, and millions of people without power or heat as winter approached.

The good news was that many people in businesses, government, and other organizations got the message. In the years following Sandy, I met hundreds of very smart, capable people working passionately on innovative solutions. They were climate scientists and modelers, architects, planners, engineers, and project managers at state and federal infrastructure agencies and environmental departments, logistics experts and disaster preparedness specialists at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and sustainability executives at corporations across the spectrum. We all shared a conviction that climate change is humanity's most urgent issue and that we need to make better choices, and tens of millions of other Americans agree with us.

At a fundamental level, there is no great mystery about what "doing better" means. Towns, cities, states, the federal government, and the private sector all have to take a more future-focused approach and do two specific things better. First, we must reduce our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and consider full life-cycle costs and impacts by enacting sustainability measures. Second, we should limit our short- as well as long-term vulnerability to extreme weather through climate adaptation and resilience measures. These goals are deeply interrelated. If we don't rapidly reduce our GHG emissions, we'll never be able to build barriers that are high, wide, and strong enough to be resilient. Similarly, if we don't improve stormwater management and integrate naturally adaptive measures, our cities will repeatedly flood and/or run short of critical resources like clean water before our sustainability measures are able to bend the curve of emissions.

If we had started two or three decades ago, arguably, rapidly reducing GHG emissions would have been sufficient to avoid the need for massive climate adaptation and resilience measures. That moment has passed. Today, the pace and advanced state of climate change means there is no either/or option-we need to reject false choices and build a resilient and sustainable future. There was also little doubt about what we didn't need after Sandy: a return to business as usual. That was what got us into this mess in the first place.

Since then, I've worked on countless projects in New York and New Jersey and across the United States that focused on resilience and sustainability. Yet, even as I could feel a shift toward these aims, it was clear we weren't all aligned. Some people had short memories about the last flood or drought or wildfire, or simply tuned out when faced with a phenomenon as complex and massive as climate change....