New York Climate Week 2026
Anna here – Community Engagement Lead for Melting Metropolis – reporting from the JFK airport waiting lounge in New York.
A Washout | Postponed | Floodlines
This year was very different from Climate Week 2025, when I was sweating through every outfit I had brought. This time, a furious storm hit the coast, closing parts of the city and postponing three of the main storytelling events I had travelled out for.
But before the weather changed everything, I had a few very good project days.
One of the things I’m learning through Melting Metropolis is that you often set out looking for one story and find another. As we explore stories about climate, the climate itself is revising our stories.
People choosing to show up.
Last year, over tacos with Kara and Danny, I asked how the community engagement work benefited them career-wise, as academic researchers in the US. Their answer was: not at all. I remember feeling uncomfortable about that. Here were two busy urban environmental historians who I relied on heavily for the New York strand of Community Engagement, and they were giving their time without an obvious professional reward.
But that was the wrong way of looking at it. They weren’t doing it because they had to. They were doing it because they thought it mattered.
With Kara Schlichting at Brooklyn Heights.
That commitment has continued to grow. Danny has been working an extra community project collecting oral histories around heat and health. Kara has been involved in a podcast. They both worked with the New York Public Library to create a new school curriculum, on a project with Urban Archive collecting New Yorkers’ experiences of summer, and they turn up to all of our community storytelling partnership events with all hands on deck.
This year, on Tuesday, over Persian food, we talked about how so much of this project has happened because people have decided to make it happen. Community work can be especially hard, so I want to take a moment to celebrate those people for choosing to show up.
Colliding stories
On Wednesday at the Brooklyn Museum, and later over lunch with community artist DaeQuan Collier, another unexpected heat story emerged.
With DaeQuan Collier at the Brooklyn Museum.
DaeQuan is developing a film about an AI data centre in the Bronx and the potential impact on heat and health in a community already disproportionately affected by urban heat. It is set in a near future, but what makes it unsettling is how plausible it feels.
DaeQuan and I reflected on the power of the near future to make people sit up and realise the path we are already firmly on - in this case, the speed at which climate change and AI are railroading our futures. And what happens to people at the intersection of that.
That is one of the great things about this project. Stories keep opening up into other stories.
Pulling together
With community partners Veronica and Kelsy from King Manor Museum, Hart from Newtown Creek, Meral and Jeifei from Queens Memory, and with Kara and Danny for exhibition planning day.
We are also now thinking about how to bring all of our stories together into community exhibitions. The plan for 2027 is for outdoor, accessible spaces with lots of footfall, rather than a traditional gallery setting. Each story is specific to a place and its history and community, but together they begin to show something much broader about urban life and climate change.
On Thursday, our workshop with community partners and storytellers focused on what voice the exhibition should have. It had us all thinking about the conversation we were starting and how we could use creative interventions, conversation starters, content, critical thinking and climate commentary to shift how people think, feel and act.
Workshop in King Manor Museum with all community partners and Newtown Creek’s storyteller-in-residence Isa Dorvillier.
Floodlines
Flooding wasn’t something I expected to feature so strongly when I came to New York, ready to focus on heat and being too hot. As it turned out, it became one of the main themes.
While I wasn’t on Melting Metropolis business, I used the time to enjoy listening to this podcast, made as part of our project by JieFei Yuan and the Queens Memory team, and featuring King Manor Museum’s storyteller-in-residence Roxanne Scott and our project New York historian Kara Schlichting.
For DaeQuan and the community in the Bronx, the project brief of exploring heat and health took them to the impact of AI infrastructure. For Jiefei, heat and health led her to intimate human portraits of flooding incidents. The podcast is beautifully presented with moving stories that find relatability through the details of everyday life, but also highlight the flood risks many New Yorkers live with and the impacts, sometimes devastating, of climate change on their lives.
I listened to it while I was there, and it made my commutes around the city feel strangely familiar. A Metro stop I’d just heard a story about, the stories intersecting with my experiences.
Then I experienced a NY floodlines story myself.
On Friday evening at the Floodlines event at Pioneer Works, Kara and Faye were discussing flooding alongside a series of events that included work documenting Hurricane Katrina’s impact on communities. It was a thoughtful and very human way of bringing climate stories into Climate Week.
Jeifei Yuan and Kara Schlichting presenting at Floodlines event in Pioneer Works.
Alongside this, the forecast was worsening. The three weekend storytelling events I had travelled to New York for were all postponed because of the approaching storm.
That evening, the city was calm and beautiful. There was a spectacular sunset. But I was also trying to understand what was coming after the calm.
We can talk about climate change through data, projections and statistics. But there is something different about hearing someone describe what it felt like and what happened for them, then standing in a city witnessing a darkening sky knowing that an event you crossed the Atlantic to attend has been postponed because of this weather. Stories, resonating, becoming real.
The climate story becomes the place you are standing in. The same happened in London’s climate week with a heatwave so unsettling, amplifying each Melting Metropolis story. Stories alongside an embodied experience create sticky memories, and I hope that our collection of stories, in conversation with more people experiencing extreme changing weather, will leave a lasting impression.
The Statue of Liberty against a darkening sky.
The three NY events will still happen. I won’t be there in person, but Danny and Kara will be.
Newtown Creek’s storyteller-in-residence Isa Dorvillier and the communities around the creek will be coming together for Shade Canopy: A Creekside Climate Walk. King Manor’s storyteller-in-residence Roxanne Scott and the contributors to her ‘zine will be hosting a ‘zine launch with readings. Hunter’s Point Discovery Day and other events will feature the Queens Memory and Citation Needed co-produced Melting Metropolis bookbinding workshop kit, where visitors are invited to contribute their own stories, impressions and memories.
And perhaps that is fitting. This project was never really about one event, one exhibition, one podcast, or one week in New York. It is about what happens when people keep showing up, even as the story changes and the plans don’t quite work out.
Farewell New York – the city, the people, the weather. I’ll be back next year. And who knows what will be waiting for me then?
