Today, we formally launch AdaptNY – which aims to curate, document and foster conversation about how New York will adapt to the coming challenges of climate change.

We have a great team for the project. Our editor is A. Adam Glenn, a long-time digital journalist, innovator and educator who is building on the lessons of his earlier Knight News Challenge project, which also focused on citizen participation and climate change.

Our partners in the project are:

• CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, a leader in digital journalism education
• Gotham Gazette, a pioneering online watchdog journalism platform
• DocumentCloud, a Knight Foundation-funded technology developer now part of Investigative Reporters and Editors

AdaptNY’s launch coincides with Mayor Bloomberg’s release of an important report today as part of his Special Initiative on Rebuiding and Resiliency following Superstorm Sandy – a report that will put forward a long-term plan to address the growing threats of climate change. The report’s recommendations will have potentially enormous implications for the city and its citizens.

Accordingly, AdaptNY’s first initiative is to foster an online conversation based around this primary source documentation. In order to find out what important stakeholders and the general public think of the Bloomberg plans, we’re working with DocumentCloud to develop a cutting-edge, easy-to-use online tool that will allow an informed public policy discussion around documents like the Bloomberg report.

While we’re initially testing the tool with discrete group of experts, we’ll quickly broaden access to the conversation to everyone with skin in the game. If you want to be part of the early stages of this growing discussion and help us test out our experimental tool, just email us at [email protected]

Over time, the project will also work to improve engagement over the issue of climate change adaptation in NYC through a wide range of existing tools and techniques, from expansive curation to data journalism, mapping, and other original interactive and multimedia storytelling techniques. We’ve also running grant-funded workshops on adaptation this summer and fall.

Stay tuned for our initiatives. And contact us at [email protected] with any thoughts or questions.