Zbigniew J Grabowski

• PhD
• Faculty Fellow at New School

Infrastructure plays a key role in 21st century sustainability challenges related to burgeoning populations, increasing material and energy demand, environmental change, and shifts in social values. Social and political controversy over infrastructure decision making will continue to intensify without robust interdisciplinary and intersectoral dial...

Abstract Climate-driven changes in coastal flood risk have enormous consequences for coastal cities. These risks intersect with unequal patterns of environmental hazards exacerbating differential vulnerability of climate related flooding. Here we analyze differential vulnerability of coastal flooding in New York City, USA, as an environmental justi...

We examine the uneven social and spatial distributions of COVID-19 and their relationships with indicators of social vulnerability in the U.S. epicenter, New York City (NYC). As of July 17th, 2020, NYC, despite having only 2.5% of the U.S. population, has ∼6% of all confirmed cases, and ∼16% of all deaths, making it a key learning ground for the so...

Green infrastructure (GI) has become a panacea for cities working to enhance sustainability and resilience. While the rationale for GI primarily focuses on its multifunctionality (e.g. delivering multiple ecosystem services to local communities), uncertainties remain around how, for whom, and to what extent GI delivers these services. Additionally,...

In response to interdependent challenges, city planners are increasingly adopting “green infrastructure” (GI). Reviewing 122 plans from 20 US cities, we identify what types of city plans address and define GI, including the concepts associated with GI, as well as the types, functions, and benefits of GI. The most common plans that feature GI, some...

Communities respond to flooding events based upon risk perceptions and available adaptive behaviors (e.g., emigrating, purchasing insurance, constructing levees). Across the United States, sea level rise, intensifying storm-surges, and extreme rainfall may alter human-flood dynamics. Here, we use calibrated Socio-Environmental models of contiguous...

In the face of systematic expropriation, massive biodiversity loss, and the ongoing climate crisis, Indigenous peoples, knowledge, and labor have protected over 80% of the global biodiversity. This is remarkable given that Indigenous management or tenure remains over 20–25% of the planet’s terrestrial surface. Indigenous people’s capacity to protec...

Green Infrastructure (GI) refers to a system of related green elements, like parks, recreation areas, street trees, rain gardens, green roofs, bicycle and pedestrian lanes, streams, rivers, and wetlands that provide many benefits. In support of more equitable green infrastructure in the city, we have compiled a number of useful data sets summarized...

Decisions to build or remove dams and other large engineered hydraulic infrastruc-tures are always entangled in social and environmental impacts, which are often evaluated formally through bureaucratic processes. In Europe dam removals are relatively infrequent, even though extensive hydraulic infrastructure has degraded biodiversity and water qual...

Urbanization is a leading cause of biodiversity loss globally. Expanding cities alter regional ecological processes by consuming habitat and modifying biogeochemical and energetic flows. Densifying cities often lose valuable intra-urban green spaces. Despite these negative impacts, novel urban ecosystems can harbor high biodiversity and provide vit...

The idea of green infrastructure (GI) has generated great interest and creativity in addressing a range of challenging and expensive environmental problems, from coastal resilience to control of combined sewer overflows (CSOs). The appeal of GI stems from its cost savings compared to traditional “gray” infrastructure and the multiple benefits it pr...

Cities across the Unites States have embraced green infrastructure (GI) in official planning efforts. The plans conceptualize GI as providing multiple functions and benefits for urban residents, and form part of complex responses to intersectional urban challenges of social injustice and inequity, climate change, aging and expensive infrastructure,...

Scholarship on Nature-based Solutions (NbS) primarily focuses on the potential for NbS to deliver multiple benefits to humans and biodiversity from networked natural systems. These approaches, if enacted without sensitivity to local contexts and histories, can deepen long standing injustices resulting from the destruction of complex self-organizing...

As rates of urbanization and climatic change soar, decision-makers are increasingly challenged to provide innovative solutions that simultaneously address climate-change impacts and risks and inclusively ensure quality of life for urban residents. Cities have turned to nature-based solutions to help address these challenges. Nature-based solutions,...

p>We examine the uneven social and spatial distributions of COVID-19 and their relationships with indicators of social vulnerability in the U.S. epicenter, New York City (NYC). As of July 17th, 2020, NYC, despite having only 2.5% of the US population, has ~6% of all confirmed cases, and ~16% of all deaths, making it a key learning ground for the so...

p>We examine the uneven social and spatial distributions of COVID-19 and their relationships with indicators of social vulnerability in the U.S. epicenter, New York City (NYC). As of July 17th, 2020, NYC, despite having only 2.5% of the US population, has ~6% of all confirmed cases, and ~16% of all deaths, making it a key learning ground for the so...

We examine the uneven social and spatial distributions of COVID-19 and their relationships with indicators of social vulnerability in the U.S. epicenter, New York City (NYC). As of July 17th, 2020, NYC, despite having only 2.5% of the US population, has ~6% of all confirmed cases, and ~16% of all deaths, making it a key learning ground for the soci...

Over 40 years of regulations in the United States have failed to protect human and environmental health. We contend that these failures result from the flawed governance over the continued production, use, and disposal of toxic chemicals. To address this failure, we need to identify the broader social, political, and technological processes produci...

As cities around the world experience rapid sea level rise (SLR), institutions and actors classify and measure SLR "risks" through discourse and specifying practices for adaptation. These risk, discourses, and practices occur at multiple scales that are embedded within one another and draw their significance from cross-scalar connections; from glob...

Urban resilience to climate change scholarship has increasingly focused on increasing its salience for existing decision making processes. At the same time, large inequalities in vulnerability to climate change mirror inequalities in the social power of different urban residents. Existing approaches have improved epistemological pluralism and refle...

Dam removals in the United States continue to accelerate in pace and scope, but no national analyses have examined how removed dams compare with existing dam stock. Here, we review and analyse the best available national data on dams from the National Inventory of Dams (NID), dam removals from American Rivers, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Na...

Selected biomarkers of health were examined in 50 post-spawning cod Gadus morhua collected in November 2015 from the southern Baltic. The biomarkers included condition factor (CF), macroscopic lesions, histopathology of spleen, liver and gonads, and morphometry of follicular atresia and hepatic and splenic melanomacrophage cells (MMC). All fish app...

Dam removal in the United States has continued to increase in pace and scope, transitioning from a dam-safety engineering practice to an integral component of many large-scale river restoration programmes. At the same time, knowledge around dam removals remains fragmented by disciplinary silos and a lack of knowledge transfer between communities of...

We generate a series of novel indicators of spatially explicit watershed permeability and runoff characteristics to examine the relationship between land cover and water temperature parameters in a rapidly urbanizing watershed. Our framework provides a readily adaptable method to examine the thermal sensitivity of streams based upon the underlying...

There is growing interest in the role that natural capital plays in underpinning ecosystem services. Yet, there remain differences and inconsistencies in the conceptualisation of capital and ecosystem services and the role that humans play in their delivery. Using worked examples in a stocks and flows systems approach, we show that both natural cap...

The need to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is more urgent now than ever. International efforts through REDD+, CDM and voluntary carbon markets aim to encourage complementary activities of forest preservation, reforestation, afforestation and sustainable forest management. Many existing programs for sustainable forest man...