Nicole Javorsky covers climate change and its implications for City Limits, which uses investigative journalism through the prism of New York City to identify urban problems, examine their causes, explore solutions and equip communities to take action. Before that, she covered environmental issues as a staff writer for The Hill’s online section, “Changing America.” She has also written about climate change and public health as a ClimateDesk fellow at Mother Jones magazine. Javorsky reported for the environment section of CityLab through The Atlantic’s editorial fellowship program. After growing up in Queens, she attended Barnard College.
Beat: Climate change and its implications for New York City
NYC has yet to confront to confront the reality of climate change, a reality with manifold policy implications—from the importance of waterfront resiliency measures to mechanisms for dealing with severe heat in the city's interior and preparing for food shortages, new communicable diseases and more. This Reporter aims to catalog under-appreciated risks and potential solutions, to keep government and industry accountable for their promises to increase protections and reduce admissions, to highlight community-based efforts to respond to the challenge of a warmer planet, and to candidly assess how the impact of climate change—and the policies New York will put in place to mitigate or manage it— will produce winners and losers. Other questions: How will climate change affect NYC’s vulnerable communities—not just those susceptible to storm surges, but also areas where a normal rainstorm wreaks havoc, where intense heat brings deadly risk, and where weather events or disease outbreaks overseas might ripple through immigrant communities? How effective are the resiliency measures the city has planned or enacted? And do efforts to reduce NY's carbon footprint distribute burdens fairly? Are developers really complying with the new flood regulations?