NEW YORK—New York is famous for its skyline, towering above waters on all sides. It is easy to forget that the skyline is not only towering above the waters, but is also rooted in them.
It seems, though, that along the way New Yorkers have turned their backs on the water surrounding them. As the city evolved, natural habitats disappeared, negatively affecting human beings, damaging the quality of water and the air.
“The goal is to reunite New Yorkers with the waterfront,” said Department of City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden in the 2010 Waterfront conference. The conference featured a preview of the City’s Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, to be published by the end of the year.
A year-long effort, the plan gives recommendations that focus on better utilizing the water for economic uses, sports, and recreation. Another facet of it is to protect and restore natural habitats in the area.
The ecological system surrounding New York is not only the jurisdiction of the city. Even though the Waterfront plan relates to ecological restoration, with some projects on the way or completed, another restoration plan engulfing the entire Hudson-Raritan estuary, stretching below Staten Island and to New Jersey, is in the works and awaiting funding.
Since 1999, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey facilitated the development of another plan, the Comprehensive Restoration Plan (CRP). This plan’s goal is to protect and preserve habitats that still exist and restore habitats that have been lost.
Over the years, 80 percent of the wetlands in the region have disappeared, water and sediment have been polluted, the oyster reefs and eelgrass habitats have disappeared completely, and public access to the waters of the estuary has been limited.
The ultimate goal of the plan is to restore the variety of habitats in the estuary, in order to provide society with increased benefits from it. It took about 10 years of work to create the CRP. The commendations were published only last year. The plan features short-term goals for 2015 and long-term goals.
According to Lisa Baron, project manager for the Harbor Program of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, even though some restoration projects were and are carried out by different authorities, there is a lack of overall coordination of effort that will benefit the estuary as a whole.
That is exactly what the plan is trying to achieve, Baron said, by acting as a program to coordinate and guide the various efforts.
