Beyond these six pilots, New York City has big plans for Governors Island. The location is already home to open spaces with native and native-adaptive plantings, an oyster restoration project, a public high school focused on maritime education, and a technology incubator for green tech businesses in development. Going forward, city officials are requiring all new development on the 172-acre island to be fossil fuel-free.
Those ambitions will get a firm boost when a consortium of partners, anchored by Stony Brook University, completes the New York Climate Exchange, a 400,000-square-foot, $700 million campus that will be a hub for climate research, education and jobs. The structure, which will break ground next year and is expected to be completed by 2028, will host conferences and include lecture halls and performance space, according to Newman. (The Climate Exchange is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the philanthropic organization of Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP.
The city’s plans to turn Governors Island into a global climate center will be helped by the fact that the island is just a quick ferry ride away from many of the heavy hitters who can move the needle on climate policy: the financiers of Wall Street, the diplomats at the United Nations, the politicians and environmentalists who attend Climate Week NYC, and the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Brooklyn Army Terminal climate tech hubs.
Hammer’s team has already started planning with the Climate Week NYC people to coordinate their activities. Those ambitions will become more attainable in June, when a hybrid ferry will start arriving on the island from Lower Manhattan.
“We’re expecting that we’ll be a hub for many of those conversations going forward,” said Stephen Hammer, CEO of the New York Climate Exchange. “If we create a welcoming space that is much more than a hotel ballroom, it’s going to be very popular.”
Ideally, Governors Island could become the US’s answer to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in northern Italy — a high-profile, month-long summit that addresses global problems, Hammer said.
To Torres-Springer, Governors Island offers yet another opportunity: the chance to preserve and restore the island’s various Colonial Revival and Greek Revival buildings, many of which date back to the island’s days as a military installation.
The work could take inspiration from the High Line project on Manhattan’s West Side, which repurposed an abandoned rail line into a 1.5-mile-long public park, said Torres-Springer, who once served as CEO of Friends of the High Line, a nonprofit group that got the project off the ground.
“It can be a model of adaptive reuse,” she said. “But we also believe that it can be so much more.”
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