In the latest for City Currents, a new weekly series on the public space blog, exploring the contours of water and public life, Véronëque Ignace, Polly Pierone, and Brett Branco from the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay-CUNY Brooklyn College, and Hannah Eisler Burnett of New York Sea Grant reflect on how community-driven flood research around Jamaica Bay can reshape how our City understands, documents, and responds to rising water. The essay asserts that just as flooding reveals the deep connections between climate change, infrastructure, and historical social inequity, solutions to address flood impacts must require more than data; it requires shared knowledge, trust, and collaboration among, across, and within communities and institutions.  

On a clear day at Jamaica Bay, the water is a friendly neighbor—inviting people over to find peace along her shores, sharing her natural wonders and abundant wildlife. But when high tides fill streets with saltwater on an otherwise calm afternoon, the water becomes an unwanted intruder, disrupting routines and interfering with community well being. For many New Yorkers living around the bay and along other stretches of the city’s coastline, flooding has become a daily consideration. The interplay between sea level rise and land elevation informs how residents navigate their neighborhoods, protect their homes and property, and imagine their futures. Beyond signaling how climate change will continue to reshape coastal communities, the impacts of these persistent floods expose long histories of disinvestment and inequality that have left some neighborhoods more vulnerable than others. 

Disparities in flood impacts and pathways to recovery reveal that flooding is not only an environmental challenge, but a systemic one—cutting across boundaries of academic discipline and municipal jurisdictions. Flooding in New York City can be caused by coastal storms, high tides, heavy rain, aging infrastructure, or a combination of these factors. Damage can be severe regardless of where floodwater originates, but research and policy responses are often fragmented, approaching the issue through the lens of a specific flood type rather than the lived experience of flooding itself. For communities already facing long-standing social and economic inequities, this siloed approach can overlook intersecting circumstances that deepen vulnerability, putting these communities at a disadvantage as floodwater compromises their access to space and resources. 

Knowledge about flood risk, impact, and recovery exists across many sectors, from community groups to government agencies. Academic institutions have a critical role in helping to navigate these complex issues by compiling knowledge across these inevitable asymmetries of expertise and power. In doing so, they support collective action, institutional accountability, and equitable futures for frontline communities. 

The Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay (SRIJB) was created to answer this call. Founded to bring a new model of collaboration to urgent environmental challenges, SRIJB operates along the boundaries where community knowledge, academic research, and municipal decision-making meet. Initially formed as a partnership between the National Park Service, New York City and the City University of New York, SRIJB brings together residents, researchers, scientists, policy experts, and city agencies to build resilience within the Jamaica Bay watershed and beyond. Its mission is not only to produce knowledge, but to make that knowledge usable—grounded in place, informed by lived experience, and capable of supporting real action.

This commitment to shared knowledge and power is reflected in SRIJB’s flood research contributions. The Institute recognizes that addressing risk requires not just better data, but stronger relationships and sustained collaboration among those most affected. Since 2018, SRIJB has been working with New York Sea Grant (NYSG) and community partners throughout Jamaica Bay on the Community Flood Watch Project, an effort to document the changing shape of flooding in New York City’s frontline communities. This work centers local knowledge of water, leveraging community-gathered and hyperlocal data, diverse partnerships invested in power sharing, and community voices. 

Flood Watch works with community organizations—from Hamilton Beach and Broad Channel to Rockaway, Canarsie, and Coney Island—to invite residents to report local flooding, share images and observations, and access resources related to flood risk. Researchers use these reports to visualize relationships between high tides and neighborhood flooding and to improve coastal hazard forecasts. Communities, in turn, use this growing archive of shared knowledge to communicate their needs, priorities, and visions to city leaders. By centering how flooding is experienced, the Community Flood Watch Project offers a deeper understanding of flooding’s urgency, complexity, and impacts.

These ongoing learnings have in turn led to the genesis of a multi-sectoral collaboration to develop a citywide flood monitoring network called the FloodNet project.

Co-led by SRIJB alongside researchers at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) and NYU Tandon School of Engineering (NYU), FloodNet is a collaborative effort that includes community partners across the city, institutional partners such as NYSG, and city agencies such as the Department of Environmental Protection, the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, and the Office of Technology and Innovation. Together, these partners work to better understand the frequency, severity, and impacts of flooding—not just for agencies and researchers, but for the people who live with it everyday.

At the heart of FloodNet is the belief that data should be shared, accessible, and shaped by community priorities. These priorities are incorporated at many stages of the project, from flood sensor placement to data visualization platform design. Openly available sensor data, presented alongside a suite of co-produced community workshops and resources, helps residents and local organizations to better understand how flooding affects their neighborhoods, connect flooding to other community concerns, and advocate for solutions rooted in their own experiences.

While FloodNet captures the depth, duration, and frequency of flooding at specific locations, the Community Flood Watch Project documents where flooding happens, how it happens, and how it is lived and experienced. Together, these initiatives bring together domains that too often remain separate: quantitative and qualitative observations about climate impacts that can reveal a path toward living with water in the present, even as we make plans for how to live differently in the future. Confronting flooding in New York City requires practitioners to think, plan, and act like water; to transcend property lines and areas of expertise, find new paths and continue to flow. 

By leveraging science to empower communities, and community knowledge to strengthen science, SRIJB leans into this fluidity. In a city surrounded by water, SRIJB recognizes flooding not just as a technical problem to be solved, but as a shared challenge, shaped by history, power and place. 

By Véronëque Ignace, Hannah Eisler Burnett, Polly Pierone, Brett Branco.

Coming next week, Street Lab shares how a pop-up on open streets can help New Yorkers stay cool.

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