By the year 2040, New York City and Long Island could lose over 80,000 homes to flooding, according to Averting Crisis, a new report released on Monday by the nonprofit Regional Plan Association (RPA).
The report said that in every NYC borough, it was likely that tracts of land would become impossible to develop, contributing to the area’s housing shortage, which could reach 1.2 million homes.
“Communities nationwide are facing a severe housing crisis marked by soaring costs, limited housing options, and stagnant construction. This crisis is largely driven by restrictive zoning regulations that impose onerous procedural requirements, ban multi-family housing, and create numerous technical hurdles,” the report said. “Unfortunately, climate hazards, especially flooding, will continue to exacerbate the housing shortage. The growing risk of climate-driven flooding jeopardizes both existing and future housing developed in flood zones.”
The New York City area has seen a shortage of homes over the last few decades, which has contributed to higher rents and home prices, reported The New York Times. Meanwhile, the city has been finding it hard to adapt to the increase in flooding and extreme weather due to global heating.
“The sooner we decide as a city to invest in resilience measures to help neighborhoods adapt — whether it’s to fortify or to move — the faster we avert leaving an even bigger crisis for the next generation,” said Amy Chester, managing director of nonprofit Rebuild by Design, as The New York Times reported.
In the New York, Connecticut and New Jersey tri-state area, almost one million multifamily buildings and houses have a high risk of flooding, according to the report.
By 2050, the number of at-risk affordable housing units in coastal areas is projected to triple. As greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, extreme weather events — made worse by sea-level rise — will continue to become more frequent, severe and damaging.
“Over time, zoning has been implemented to favor sprawl while limiting compact development. As a result, our current zoning exacerbates both our housing and climate crises. The same zoning regulations that constrain compact housing development are subjecting residents to increasing and more severe climate hazards,” the report said.
In the report, RPA offered insights into zoning reform and necessary policies to address the twin climate adaptation and housing needs of the study area, which included New York City and the suburban areas of Suffolk, Nassau and Westchester Counties.
Of the 82,000 residences that could be destroyed by 2040, more than half were predicted to be on Long Island.
“Of the many climate hazards threatening the study area, flood risks may have the most impact, as approximately 77,300 acres of residential-zoned land (10.5%) could face future flooding, and by the year 2040, up to 82,000 housing units could be lost due to permanent, chronic, and coastal flooding,” the report said. “In many municipalities in Westchester and especially Long Island, locally controlled zoning often restricts residential development in locations with good transportation access, job opportunities, and limited flood exposure. Despite being close to New York City, suburbs on Long Island and in Westchester County ban multifamily development on over 95% of their residential land.”
In the city, waterfront neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, such as Canarsie and the Rockaways, would experience the most flooding losses.
Some new developments in Queens’ Rockaway Peninsula — home to approximately 125,000 residents — have been trying to safeguard people against flooding while providing dense, affordable housing.
A system of engineered berms in the Rockaways with steel and stone walls at their centers will help protect the peninsula’s ocean-facing side. There hasn’t been much progress on the bay side, however, which floods on a regular basis.
Other mitigation measures in New York City that are in various stages of completion include floodgates and walls on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as well as bluebelts connecting storm sewers to ponds and lakes.
The report said the area already needs 362,000 more homes to relieve overcrowding, provide housing for those in shelters and address low vacancy rates. An additional 895,000 units could be needed by 2040 to address flooding losses, household formation changes and dilapidation.
Towns and cities should cluster their growth in regional areas with a relatively lower flood risk that are close to commercial hubs and public transportation, according to the report.
Max Besbris, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociology professor, said the threat of global heating means local officials need to “rethink what a conventional home looks like.”
“That means denser housing, more energy-efficient housing, and that probably means giving up on that suburban ideal of a stand-alone home with a white picket fence,” Besbris said, as reported by The New York Times.
The post NYC and Long Island Could Lose 80,000 Homes to Flooding by 2040, Exacerbating Housing Crisis: Report appeared first on EcoWatch.
https://www.ecowatch.com/new-york-homes-flooding-risk-2040.html
Green Living
Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Dandelion Energy CEO Dan Yates On How Geothermal Leasing Could Transform Home Heating and Cooling
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Return to one of our most compelling interviews of 2025. Amazingly, the same Congressional bill that gutted residential clean energy tax credits also led to a major breakthrough in financing home geothermal systems. Dan Yates, CEO of Dandelion Energy, explains how the Big, Beautiful Bill introduced changes that, for the first time, allow third-party leasing of residential geothermal systems. He shares why this policy change could help ground-source heat pumps grow the way leasing helped rooftop solar. Geothermal heating and cooling is four times more efficient than a furnace and twice as efficient as air-source heat pumps. Yet only about 1% of U.S. homes use it because the upfront costs for new geothermal systems have ranged from $20,000 to $31,000. The new leasing model means new homeowners can get geothermal systems for just $10 to $40 per month on a 20-year lease, which is usually far less than what they save on energy.
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Editor’s Note: This episode originally aired on December 29, 2025.
The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: Dandelion Energy CEO Dan Yates On How Geothermal Leasing Could Transform Home Heating and Cooling appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-dandelion-energy-ceo-dan-yates-on-how-geothermal-leasing-could-transform-home-heating-and-cooling/
The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970 — 56 years ago — and, goodness, how the world has changed since then. We’ve come a long way since the days of burning our trash and pumping our gas guzzlers with leaded gasoline. In honor of those 56 years, here are 56 important changes and milestones since the first Earth Day.
Legislation
The U.S. government has led much of the environmental charge, starting with the implementation of the EPA (1) in July 1970. Later that year, the Clean Air Act (2) targeted air pollutants, followed by the Clean Water Act (3) in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act (4) in 1973.
Some lesser-known national laws included the Safe Water Drinking Act (5) in 1974, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (6) in 1976, the Toxic Substances Control Act (7) in 1976, the National Energy Act (8) in 1978, and the Medical Waste Tracking Act (9) in 1988.
In some cases, states have led the charge. Oregon passed the first bottle bill (10) in 1971, Minnesota’s Clean Indoor Air Act (11) was the first law to restrict smoking in public places (1975), and Massachusetts required low-flush toilets (12) for construction and remodeling in 1988.
Green Innovations: The Early Years
In order to comply with all the laws from the 1970s, we needed new technology to ensure consumers could adhere to the new standards. Consider:
- The “Crying Indian” PSA debuts in 1971 (13)
- Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) gets banned in 1972 (14)
- The energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb launches in 1973 (15)
- Cars begin displaying fuel economy labels in the mid-1970s (16)
- In 1975, all cars are manufactured with catalytic converters to limit exhaust emissions (17)
- Chlorofluorocarbons are banned from aerosol cans starting in 1978 (18)
- The first curbside recycling program begins in New Jersey in 1980 (19)
- In 1986, McDonald’s switches from foam to paper food containers (20)
- Mercury is removed from latex paint in 1990, providing a viable alternative to banned lead paint (21)
- Earth911 launches the first U.S. recycling directory in 1991 (22)
- Energy Star certification debuts in 1992 for appliances and electronics (23)
- The U.S. Green Building Council begins in 1993 (24)
The Political Movement
The Green Party (25) launched in 1984, which was just the beginning of green issues entering the mainstream. One Percent for the Planet (26) was founded in 2002 to challenge businesses to donate to environmental causes, and the ISO 14001 standard (27) established environmental management. Companies are now facing pressure to allow employee telecommuting (28).
Things really developed after the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (29) in 2006. NBC debuted Green Week (30) in 2007. Carbon offsets (31) alleviated corporate green guilt. Bisphenol A (32) made us all question plastic purchases. Hybrid vehicles (33) generated tax credits and gas savings. Plastic bag bans gave rise to a reusable bag (34) craze. Fracking (35) and the Dakota Access Pipeline (36) were two of the most hotly contested news stories of the decade, at least until the 2016 election.
Green Tech: The Next Wave
In the past 10 years, emerging green tech has made eco-friendly a way of life, including:
- LED light bulbs (37)
- Portable solar panels on backpacks and watches (38)
- Plant-based plastics (39)
- Motion sensor lighting (40)
- Faucets with automatic shut-off (41)
- Low volatile organic compound (VOC) paint (42)
- Recycled plastic clothing (43)
- Ride-sharing mobile applications (44)
- Natural cleaning products (45)
- Biodiesel engine vehicles (46)
- Food waste composting (47)
- Portable air purifiers (48)
- Europe’s Green Deal introduced global recyclables shipping regulations to reduce pollution in low-income nations (49)
- Corporate borrowers headed toward $500 billion in bond financings for the renewables transition (50)
- President Biden rejoins the Paris Climate Accord on his first day in office. (51)
The Latest Five: 2022–2026
The pace of innovation has not slowed. Five more milestones have reshaped the environmental landscape since that 51st Earth Day:
- The Inflation Reduction Act (52), signed into law in August 2022, became the largest climate investment in U.S. history, directing roughly $370 billion toward clean energy tax credits, EV incentives, methane reduction, and domestic clean manufacturing. Analysts projected it will drive more than $4 trillion in cumulative capital investment over a decade and put the U.S. on track for a 40% emissions reduction by 2030. Sadly, many of its key provisions have been defunded or eliminated by the Trump Administration.
- The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (53), adopted by 188 governments in December 2022, set the most ambitious biodiversity protection commitment in history. Its headline “30×30” target calls for conserving 30% of the planet’s land, freshwater, and ocean areas by 2030, a goal that would require doubling current protected land coverage and quadrupling marine protections.
- America’s first commercial direct air capture plant (54), opened by Heirloom Carbon Technologies in Tracy, California in November 2023, marked the arrival of atmospheric carbon removal at commercial scale on U.S. soil. The plant uses limestone to absorb CO₂ directly from the air, with the captured carbon injected into concrete for permanent storage. In May 2024, Climeworks activated the world’s largest direct air capture facility, the Mammoth plant in Iceland, with a design capacity to remove 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year.
- Solid-state batteries (55), a next-generation alternative to conventional lithium-ion technology, moved from laboratory promise toward commercial reality between 2022 and 2026. Unlike liquid-electrolyte batteries, solid-state versions are less flammable, achieve higher energy density, and degrade more slowly. In early 2025, Mercedes-Benz began road-testing a prototype EV powered by a lithium-metal solid-state cell that extended driving range 25% over comparable liquid-battery models. Multiple automakers and cell manufacturers now target commercial production between 2027 and 2030.
- Perovskite and tandem solar cells (56), a new photovoltaic technology that pairs conventional silicon with thin perovskite layers, pushed solar efficiency into territory once considered theoretical. By 2024, tandem cells in laboratory settings exceeded 34% efficiency — well above the roughly 22% ceiling of standard silicon panels only a few years ago. manufacturers in Asia and Europe began scaling pilot production lines. Because perovskite cells can be printed on flexible substrates, they open the door to solar surfaces on buildings, vehicles, and everyday objects that conventional panels cannot reach.
The past 56 years have been huge when it comes to saving the environment. Expect more to come, including a resurgent EV industry, nuclear fusion, regenerative agriculture, restorative forestry, and more, as costs and the cool factor improve.
Editor’s Note: Originally published on April 18, 2018, this article was most recently updated in April 2026.
The post 56 Environmental Innovations in the 56 Years Since Earth Day Began appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/eco-tech/eco-friendly-innovations/
This week’s quotation is from Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd president of the United States: “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”
Earth911 inspiration posters: Post them and share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.
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