Turning a Big Ship: Managing Climate Risk at the Port of NY & NJ

Abstract: The Port of New York and New Jersey (PONYNJ) is the largest on the East Coast and vies for busiest in the United States. A critical gateway for goods to the Metro NY/NJ region and a major economic engine, New Jersey’s residents and businesses depend on the Port’s operations. Often overlooked as a major stabilizing factor for the region, the Port’s importance was revealed after Superstorm Sandy and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic when supply chains were disrupted and most needed.

The PONYNJ is literally and figuratively on the forefront of climate resilience. With operations that are water-adjacent and water-dependent, the PONYNJ has no choice but to adapt to changing climate conditions to minimize infrastructure damage and operational disruptions. In collaboration with our tenants and partner agencies, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) Engineering Department is actively studying, planning, designing, and constructing for a climate resilient future.

PONYNJ infrastructure is robust, built to last, and hardened to weather storms, but not always easy to adapt. Opportunities to increase resilience require forethought, planning, and strategic investment. We have found the most success by way of three channels – 1) mandatory, forward-looking design guidelines that apply to all PANYNJ projects, 2) asset-based climate risk assessments that pinpoint emerging risks, and 3) a dogged willingness to seek out opportunities to put a climate lens on every study, proposal, and project scope.

At the PANYNJ we have a long history, nearly 15 years, of enhancing our design flood elevations to incorporate sea level rise in capital projects, but what keeps us up at night are the risks that we may be overlooking. Hurricane Ida was a wake-up call that we need to take extreme rainfall as seriously as we took storm surge after Superstorm Sandy. And although heat has not impacted our ports yet, we cannot take our eyes off the potential for extreme heat to cause damage to infrastructure and slow operations.

For these reasons, the PANYNJ has embarked on a multi-year, agency-wide climate risk assessment that produces risk profiles for every critical asset, including tenant and third-party assets, quantifies the consequences of direct and cascading impacts to revenue and the regional economy, and optimizes a portfolio of resilience projects to draw down our highest priority risks.

We would like to share our approach, means and methodology, and lessons learned from 15 years of climate resilient planning, design, and construction. Topics to discuss include scoping an action-oriented climate risk assessment for your organization, a systems-based approach to measuring risk, identifying and prioritizing assets to protect, resilient design strategies, and the importance of looking beyond your port boundaries for a resilient supply chain.

How does this project / topic contribute to the advancement of the industry and profession?: The PANYNJ periodically benchmarks its efforts to understand and prepare for the impacts of climatic changes, especially when undertaking large studies or a large capital improvement program. Consistently we find that we are having to break new ground, whether evaluating climate resilient design opportunities in wharf replacements, or scoping an asset-based climate risk assessment that models systems and cascading impacts, which is lightyears ahead of a standard “stoplight” risk assessment. We also acknowledge the existential threat of climate change and are committed to sharing our methods and lessons learned with the industry.

Does the project / topic implement new and innovative techniques, materials, technologies, and delivery methods?: We will cover innovative approaches to design standards, the Wharf Replacement Study, and the Climate Risk Assessment. Our Climate Resilience Guidelines address sea level rise, storm surge, precipitation, and heat in a “code-plus” approach, while our Sustainable Infrastructure Guidelines align with ASCE 73. The Wharf Replacement Study embraces the concept of adaptive capacity (as recommended in ASCE MOP 140), to leverage the opportunity of a reconstruction to build in adaptive capacity. The Climate Risk Assessment is the first data-driven, engineering-grade examination of future climate impacts to PONYNJ’s assets.

What was the most challenging aspect of your project / topic and how did you handle it to ensure success?: After surveying the available tools on the market, we concluded that we needed to build our own asset investment decision support tool, with the help of a consultant technology team. We underestimated how computationally intensive and complex the coding would be to mimic the consequences of thousands of interconnected assets, under a range of climate scenarios, over many decades. Ports are incredibly complex facilities, especially once you consider the on- and off-port systems that enable their operations. Through collaboration, persistence, and clarity of purpose, the technology team delivered the risk and mitigation data we needed to complete the task.

Who is the target audience for this paper?: Port authorities, Port facility operators, Planning and Engineering communities, risk managers and asset managers.