Introduction

Perhaps more than any other region of New York, the changing climate is most visible along the shores of Jamaica Bay. There have already been worsening and higher storm surges. High tide events are now accompanied by sunny-day flooding, damaging infrastructure and housing without the presence of a storm. Flood maps bleakly erase the entire Rockaway Peninsula by the close of the century. The future of the coastal communities of Jamaica Bay is an increasingly wet and uncertain one, where the escalating costs of shoring those regions against temporary and permanent forms of flooding is becoming an ever greater reality. Climate change will also have dramatic events on the Bay’s already fragile and complex maritime ecosystem where each ecotone is tightly pressed against the other, threatening always to collapse, but persisting. This proposal seeks to stabilize this ecosystem, through the widespread planting of a coastal forest around the entire Bay and along the seaward side of the Peninsula to provide additional benefits to the region and to assist in coastal resiliency.

Numerous proposals abound to protect the region from the risk it carries. Many require expansive infrastructure, or pose new ecological challenges, some are ambitious but lack funding or support, others yet are mired in the struggles of property rights. A coastal forest gives us something to do today, to use up vacant and abandoned land, to fill parks, and to stabilize beaches. This proposal presents a project that is both alternative and adjacent to the others, an interim solution as much as a permanent one, a coastal imaginary that can be started as soon as today. The benefits of a coastal forest are numerous, the more obvious are the creation of new human recreation zones and the formation of new ecological communities, however in the context of coastal resiliency, coastal forests much greater functional support, such as attenuating waves during storm surges, stabilizing dunes and other coastal landscapes, and the creating of safe zones either as lowland floodplains or as upland evacuation routes. Particular to this proposal, the planting of a coastal forest provides an opportunity for a new iconic green space in the city, a linear park and coastal resiliency project around which new conversations about the waters edge may emerge. A coastal forest determines a new resilient shoreline ecosystem which plays a vital role as a new mediator between the sea and the city.

It is optimistic perhaps to think that a coastal forest may maintain the status quo in Jamaica Bay, however, changes to the region are certain to come as the planet warms over the next century. Even the most conservative flooding risk estimates illustrate the radical transformations that will occur in both coastal geography, and in human population. A changing climate has also meant that adaptation strategies may not be able to use pre-existing methodologies for success with coastal forest plantings today. Trees that may have been the right choice for planting 10 years ago, may no longer be the right choice today. This coastal forest proposal will be understood in this context of climactic and geophysical transformation, and provides an opportunity to rethink how the Rockaways may begin to adapt to the new realities of climate change through green infrastructure.