Deborah Balk

• PhD
• Professor at Baruch College

Climate change is affecting or will affect the lives of every resident of New York State. This chapter examines the impacts of climate change on five critical areas in the state: populations and migration, the economy, education, culture, and government. The chapter highlights differential vulnerabilities among the state's regions, populations, wor...

This chapter provides an overview of the major themes, findings, and recommendations from NPCC4. It presents summary statements from each chapter of the assessment which identify salient and pressing issues raised and provides recommendations for future research and for enhancement of climate resiliency. The chapter also outlines a set of broader r...

This chapter of the New York City Panel on Climate Change 4 (NPCC4) report considers climate health risks, vulnerabilities, and resilience strategies in New York City’s unique urban context. It updates evidence since the last health assessment in 2015 as part of NPCC2 and addresses climate health risks and vulnerabilities that have emerged as espec...

This Introduction to NPCC4 provides an overview of the first three NPCC Reports and contextualizes NPCC4's deliberate decision to address justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in its collective work and in its own practices, procedures, and methods of assessment. Next, it summarizes the assessment process, including greater emphasis on sustaine...

This chapter of the New York City Panel on Climate Change 4 (NPCC4) report discusses the many intersecting social, ecological, and technological‐infrastructure dimensions of New York City (NYC) and their interactions that are critical to address in order to transition to and secure a climate‐adapted future for all New Yorkers. The authors provide a...

This chapter of the New York City Panel on Climate Change 4 (NPCC4) report considers climate health risks, vulnerabilities, and resilience strategies in New York City's unique urban context. It updates evidence since the last health assessment in 2015 as part of NPCC2 and addresses climate health risks and vulnerabilities that have emerged as espec...

New York City (NYC) faces many challenges in the coming decades due to climate change and its interactions with social vulnerabilities and uneven urban development patterns and processes. This New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) report contributes to the Panel's mandate to advise the city on climate change and provide timely climate risk i...

New York City (NYC) faces many challenges in coming decades due to climate change and its interactions with social vulnerabilities and uneven urban development patterns and processes. This New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC) report contributes to the Panel's mandate to advise the city on climate change and provide timely climate risk infor...

This chapter of the New York City Panel on Climate Change 4 (NPCC4) report discusses the many intersecting social, ecological, and technological-infrastructure dimensions of New York City and their interactions that are critical to address in order to transition to and secure a climate-adapted future for all New Yorkers. The authors provide an asse...

A large number of Censuses and surveys around the globe only measure ‘migrations’ crossing particular politico‐administrative boundaries, most commonly ‘major’ areas like states. These moves, in turn, are often assumed to be representative of all long‐distance or, in some settings, urban–urban moves. While important because such boundaries signal r...

Climate change is putting low-lying coastal zones at increased risk, through higher sea levels and changes in the weather. Deltas are subsiding, compounding such risks. Confirming past research, we find roughly 10 per cent of the world’s population and an even higher share of its urban population are located in coastal areas under 10 metres in elev...

Fine scale data collection on vulnerability metrics is necessary for just policy outcomes. Those most likely to be disproportionately affected by specific climate risks should be identified early so that the needs of vulnerable communities (especially historically marginalized communities) can be addressed and mitigated in accordance with climate j...

Coastal marshes are efficient ecosystems providing a multitude of benefits for invertebrates, birds, fish and humans alike. Yet despite these benefits, wetlands are threatened by anthropogenic inputs such as human wastewater which contain high levels of nitrogen (N). Increased nitrogen loads cause eutrophication and hypoxia in estuaries leading to...

India is one of the world’s most flood-prone countries, with present-day risks likely to be exacerbated by climate change in the coming decades. The type of risk varies by location, with the lives, homes, and livelihoods of residents of India’s coastal megacities threatened by coastal floods and storm surges while village-dwellers residing in rural...

Cities are at the forefront of climate change action and planning for futures that are concomitantly more resilient and equitable, making local goals imperative for global sustainability. Under the multiple challenges of changing climatic, ecological and socio-economic conditions, cities need the means to meet these goals. We know cities are and wi...

Indonesia has nearly doubled its urban population in the past three decades. In this period, the prevalence of overweight and obesity in Indonesia has also nearly doubled. We examined 1993–2014 panel data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to determine the extent to which the increase in one’s built environment contributed to a correspon...

An improved understanding of reclassification as a sociodemographic component of urban growth is important for urban planning and sustainable development. However, empirical assessments of the effect of reclassification on urban population dynamics are lacking, especially in countries in the later stage of the urban transition. Using recently avail...

“Global harmonization of urbanization measures: Proceed with care”

The accurate estimation of population living in the low-elevation coastal zone (LECZ) – and at heightened risk from sea level rise – is critically important for policymakers and risk managers worldwide. This characterization of potential exposure depends on robust representations not only of coastal elevation and spatial population data but also of...

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to be living in cities and towns, a marked increase from today’s level of 55 percent. If the general trend is unmistakable, efforts to measure it precisely have been beset with difficulties: the criteria defining urban areas, cities and towns differ from one country to the next and can also...

Urban nature—such as greenness and parks—can alleviate distress and provide space for safe recreation during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, nature is often less available in low-income populations and communities of colour—the same communities hardest hit by COVID-19. In analyses of two datasets, we quantified inequity in greenness and park proxim...

The accurate estimation of population living in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ), and at heightened risk from sea level rise, is critically important for policy makers and risk managers worldwide. This characterization of potential exposure depends not only on robust representations of coastal elevation and spatial population data, but also of...

In May 2020, the New York City (NYC) Mayor’s Office of Climate Resiliency (MOCR) began convening bi-weekly discussions, called the Rapid Research and Assessment (RRA) Series, between City staff and external experts in science, policy, design, engineering, communications, and planning. The goal was to rapidly develop authoritative, actionable inform...

Urban tree cover provides benefits to human health and well-being, but previous studies suggest that tree cover is often inequitably distributed. Here, we use National Agriculture Imagery Program digital ortho photographs to survey the tree cover inequality for Census blocks in US large urbanized areas, home to 167 million people across 5,723 munic...

Extreme heat has been responsible for more deaths in the United States than any other weather-related phenomenon over the past decade. The frequency and intensity of extreme heat events are projected to increase over the course of this century. In this work, we examine historical patterns of extreme heat exposure and mortality in the continental Un...

Urban nature can alleviate distress and provide space for safe recreation during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, nature is often less available in low-income and communities of color—the same communities hardest hit by COVID-19. We quantified nature inequality across all urbanized areas in the US and linked nature access to COVID-19 case rates for...

The collection, processing, and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth's surface. While satellite-based Earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail....

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The name “Kluger” in the second paragraph should be changed to “Kugler”.

Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing rapid urban growth. Cities enable greater access to health services and improved water and sanitation infrastructure, leading to some improvements in health. However, urban settings may also be associated with more sedentary, stressful lifestyles and consumption of less nutritious food. C-reactive protein (CRP) is...

The collection, processing and analysis of remote sensing data since the early 1970s has rapidly improved our understanding of change on the Earth’s surface. While satellite-based earth observation has proven to be of vast scientific value, these data are typically confined to recent decades of observation and often lack important thematic detail....

Importance The prevalence of extreme obesity continues to increase among adults in the US, yet there is an absence of subnational estimates and geographic description of extreme obesity. This shortcoming prevents a thorough understanding of the geographic distribution of extreme obesity, which in turn limits the ability of public health agencies an...

Like much of Asia, Bangladesh will see an urban transition in the coming decades. Yet, its urbanisation will be unprecedented in terms of climate vulnerabilities. Little is known about urbanisation and migrants, in the context of these vulnerabilities, in part because demographic inquiry and training (with a few notable exceptions) has only begun i...

In today’s increasingly urban world, understanding the components of urban population growth is essential. While the demographic components of natural increase and migration have received the overwhelming share of attention to date, this paper addresses the effects of administrative reclassification on urban population growth as derived from census...

While the population of the United States has been predominantly urban for nearly 100 years, periodic transformations of the concepts and measures that define urban places and population have taken place, complicating over-time comparisons. We compare and combine data series of officially-designated urban areas, 1990–2010, at the census block-level...

Population data represent an essential component in studies focusing on human–nature interrelationships, disaster risk assessment and environmental health. Several recent efforts have produced global- and continental-extent gridded population data which are becoming increasingly popular among various research communities. However, these data produc...

Population data represent an essential component in studies focusing on human-nature interrelationships, disaster risk assessment and environmental health. Several recent efforts have produced global and continental-extent gridded population data which are becoming increasingly popular among various research communities. However, these data product...

Diarrhea is a major contributor to child morbidity and mortality in West Africa. Non-spatial regression and geographically weighted Poisson regression applied to data from 10 Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in West Africa from 2008 to 2013 show that water source, toilet type, mother’s education, latitude, temperature, rainfall, altitude, a...

Given downward trends in fertility and mortality, population dynamics –and thus theestimation of spatially-explicit population dynamics and gridded population and derivativeproducts– are increasingly sensitive to mobility processes and their changes in spatiality. In thispaper, we present a procedure to produce origin-destination intermunicipal/int...

Over the last century, numbers of wild tigers (Panthera tigris) have crashed, while human populations have boomed. Here we investigate future trajectories of human population within tiger range through analysis of the shared socio-economic pathways (SSPs). These five pathways describe urban, rural and total population distributions by decade throug...

India is the world’s most populous country, yet also one of the least urban. It has long been known that India’s official estimates of urban percentages conflict with estimates derived from alternative conceptions of urbanization. To date, however, the detailed spatial and settlement boundary data needed to analyze and reconcile these differences h...

Most of future population growth will take place in the world’s cities and towns. Yet, there is no well-established, consistent way to measure either urban land or people. Even census-based urban concepts and measures undergo frequent revision, impeding rigorous comparisons over time and place. This study presents a new spatial approach to derive c...

Workflow for allocating land and population across urban classification scheme. (TIF)

Urban classifications, 1990 (upper) and 2010 (lower), with year-2000 MSA boundary, for selected pairs of large and small MSAs. (TIF)

Population and land area by urban classification, 25% GHSL threshold. (DOCX)

Sensitivity tests using alternative GHSL thresholds: Estimates of population and land area. (DOCX)

Population and land area by urban classification, 40% GHSL threshold. (DOCX)

Additional methodological detail. (DOCX)

Constructing urban layers for the New York City MSA, including (a) urban blocks, (b) all urban land (GHSL 50% threshold), (c) urban inclusive area (UI), (d) urban agreement (UAg), (e) urban people only (UPO), (f) built-up land only (BULO), and (g) the entire urban hierarchy (including RE, UAg, UPO and BULO). Green background indicates rural extents...

There is an increasing availability of geospatial data describing patterns of human settlement and population such as various global remote-sensing based built-up land layers, fine-grained census-based population estimates, and publicly available cadastral and building footprint data. This development constitutes new integrative modeling opportunit...

In this case study of Greater Saigon, two types of satellite data are used to estimate the rate of change in urban spatial expansion, both horizontally and volumetrically (horizontal and vertical components), and integrates them with socioeconomic data to examine the correlates and potential causes of both kinds of change. We employ new data produc...

Global data on settlements, built-up land and population distributions are becoming increasingly available and represent important inputs to a better understanding of key demographic processes such as urbanization and interactions between human and natural systems over time. One persistent drawback that prevents user communities from effectively an...

InPress

There is an increasing availability of multi-temporal land use and built-up land datasets. However, little research has been done regarding the spatiotemporal uncertainty of these datasets. In this work we present an approach for the spatiotemporal validation of the novel Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) made by automatic classification of glob...

There is an increasing availability of multi-temporal land use and built-up land datasets. However, little research has been done regarding the spatiotemporal uncertainty of these data products. In this work we present an approach that has the potential to be applicable for spatiotemporal evaluation of the novel Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL)...

An increasing amount of multi-temporal land use and built-up land datasets will be made available in the near future. However, little research has been done regarding the spatiotemporal uncertainty of these datasets. Publicly available cadastral parcel data including temporal information about construction dates of structures may be a useful source...

This chapter assembles a quantitative portrait of the adolescent girls who migrate to the cities and towns of poor countries, drawing mainly on a large collection of data from demographic surveys and census micro-samples. For adolescent girls and young women, migration puts important urban resources within reach, in the form of access to higher lev...

While malnutrition remains an important public health concern in poor countries, particularly among the rural and urban poor, overweight and obesity are emerging as important public health concerns for urban individuals. Globalization of the fast food industry and shifts in physical activity patterns in urban areas can result in different risks for...

Abstract Urban growth is increasing the demand for freshwater resources, yet surprisingly the water sources of the world's large cities have never been globally assessed, hampering efforts to assess the distribution and causes of urban water stress. We conducted the first global survey of the large cities’ water sources, and show that previous glob...

Various remote sensing methods and demographic datasets are used in the Beijing case study to illustrate their capability to observed physical and demographic characteristics of the urban environment. NL data serve well to identify the outer limit of not only large urban areas but also small settlements. For each large urban contour limit from NL,...

Appraisal of urbanization trends is limited by the lack of a globally consistent definition of what is meant by urban. This article seeks to identify and explain differences in the definition of “urbanness” as used in two largely distinct research communities. We compare the Global Rural–Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP), which defines urban areas base...

The use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in disease surveys and reporting is becoming increasingly routine, enabling a better understanding of spatial epidemiology and the improvement of surveillance and control strategies. In turn, the greater availability of spatially referenced epidemiological data i...

As urban populations continue to grow, poor countries and international aid agencies are likely to face mounting pressure to rethink their development strategies and set priorities with both rural and urban interests in mind. To engage effectively with the emerging trends, countries and agencies will need to base their decisions on demographic esti...

Nearly 3 billion additional urban dwellers are forecasted by 2050, an unprecedented wave of urban growth. While cities struggle to provide water to these new residents, they will also face equally unprecedented hydrologic changes due to global climate change. Here we use a detailed hydrologic model, demographic projections, and climate change scena...

City size distributions, defined on the basis of population, are often described by power laws. Zipf's Law states that the exponent of the power law for rank-size distributions of cities is near −1. Verification of power law scaling for city size distributions at continental and global scales is complicated by small sample sizes, inappropriate esti...

In this paper we give an overview of existing broad-scale population distribution modeling concepts in terms of their different levels of spatial and thematic complexity. The corresponding global or continental-scale datasets are described in terms of their individual characteristics. Special focus is put on using the accessibility concept for real...

A global and consistent characterization of land use and land change in urban and suburban environments is crucial for many fundamental social and natural science studies and applications. Presented here is a dense sampling method (DSM) that uses satellite scatterometer data to delineate urban and intraurban areas at a posting scale of about 1 km....

This paper examines the climate-related risks that will face the inhabitants of developing-country cities and towns in the decades to come. It draws upon a newly-assembled, comprehensive database with information on city population size and growth for several thousand cities in the developing world (United Nations 2008). For the first time, these c...

The Millennium Development Goals (MIDGs) have put maternal health in the mainstream, but there is a need to go beyond the MDGs to address equity within countries. We argue that MDG focus on maternal health is necessary but not sufficient. This paper uses Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from Kenya, Ethiopia and Ghana to examine a set of mat...

This paper examines the climate-related risks that will face the urban populations of developing countries in the decades to come. We base our study on a new and comprehensive database that draws upon city size and growth data for several thousand cities in the developing world (United Nations 2008) and which—for the first time—situates these data...

with the rural populations of these countries forecast to be on the decline. Where, precisely, will this massive urban growth take place? Is it likely to be located in the regions of poor countries that appear to be environmentally secure or in regions likely to feel the brunt of climate-related change in the coming decades? This chapter documents...

Natural hazards are uncontrollable and unexpected and often affect large populations and vast geographic areas. The ability to respond quickly and provide assistance directly to the populations most affected is a key element in the rehabilitation of the area and of the lives of those exposed. In the aftermath of the Tsunami that occurred in Asia in...

We describe the compilation of a spatially explicit data-set detailing infant mortality rates in over 10,000 national and subnational units worldwide, benchmarked to the year 2000. Although their resolution is highly variable, subnational data are available for countries representing over 90% of the non-OECD population. Concentration of global infa...

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are a significant burden on global economies and public health. Their emergence is thought to be driven largely by socio-economic, environmental and ecological factors, but no comparative study has explicitly analysed these linkages to understand global temporal and spatial patterns of EIDs. Here we analyse a dat...

A global and consistent characterization of land use and land change in urban and suburban environments are crucial for many fundamental social and economic science studies and applications. Here, we present for the first time a dense sampling method (DSM) that uses satellite scatterometer data at a coarse resolution (~12 km) to delineate urban and...

We aimed to quantify tsunami mortality and compare approaches to mortality assessment in the emergency context in Aceh, Indonesia, where the impact of the 2004 tsunami was greatest. Mortality was estimated using geographic information systems-based vulnerability models and demographic methods from surveys of tsunami-displaced populations. Tsunami m...

Settlements in coastal lowlands are especially vulnerable to risks resulting from climate change, yet these lowlands are densely settled and growing rapidly. In this paper, we undertake the first global review of the population and urban settlement patterns in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ), defined here as the contiguous area along the coas...

This analysis seeks to set the stage for equity-sensitive monitoring of the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). We use data from international household-level surveys (Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)) to demonstrate that establishing an equity baseline is necessary and feasible, eve...

OBJECTIVE: This analysis seeks to set the stage for equity-sensitive monitoring of the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). METHODS: We use data from international household-level surveys (Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS)) to demonstrate that establishing an equity baseline is necessa...

Evaluating the total numbers of people at risk from infectious disease in the world requires not just tabular population data, but data that are spatially explicit and global in extent at a moderate resolution. This review describes the basic methods for constructing estimates of global population distribution with attention to recent advances in i...