New York City Council introduces new resilience test for city-funded capital projects

The New York City Council has passed a bill that will require the city-funded buildings, infrastructure projects, and retrofits to meet the minimum necessary resilience score and climate resiliency design guidelines and regulations. This bill aims to ensure that facilities such as libraries, schools, bridges, and other affordable housing developments are designed so that the withstand climate and environmental threats.

The US legislation will codify the Climate Resilience Design Guidelines that was first developed in 2017. These guidelines will provide step-by-step instructions on the city facilities' design, the historic factors about the climatic data, and the building codes along with the climatic projections. The guidelines will also provide the basis of the creation and a new resiliency scoring metric that the builders must follow for every project.

The US government has stead that each project's resiliency score should be posted on a public-facing website. The score will also be applicable to capital projects over US$10 million, and the project managers should account for factors such as flooding risk, energy efficiency, on-site water capture and management, and energy resilience. The entire New York City must meet the resilience guidelines and a scoring metric for projects that set minimum resiliency standards.