By: Brendan Spiegel

This week is Climate Week NYC, an annual gathering held alongside the United Nations General Assembly that brings global leaders from government, business, finance and civil society to New York to discuss—and make decisions about—how the world responds to climate change. 

But across New York City, that response isn't just happening in conference rooms. It's happening on construction sites. 

New York is in the early stages of a massive physical transformation aimed at protecting the city from rising seas and increasingly intense storms while reducing the emissions that contribute to climate change. That means climate policy is increasingly becoming construction policy. 

The city's Green Economy Action Plan projects that New York's green economy will grow to nearly 400,000 jobs by 2040, contributing $89 billion annually to the city's economy. About 70 percent of that growth is projected to come from existing jobs—including construction managers and other existing occupations—incorporating greener practices into their everyday work. 

The scale varies dramatically. Some projects involve relatively small crews, while the city's largest coastal resiliency projects represent billion-dollar, multiyear construction efforts supporting thousands of union careers. Here are four ways that transformation is taking shape.

Some of New York's biggest climate-related construction projects aren't buildings at all. They're floodwalls, gates, raised streets and other infrastructure designed to protect waterfront neighborhoods from rising seas and storm surges. 

The $1.7 billion Battery Park City Resiliency Project is being delivered by a joint venture between Turner Construction and SPC Construction under a Project Labor Agreement with the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York. According to the Battery Park City Authority, the agreement is expected to support thousands of union careers, ensure family-sustaining wages and expand opportunities for apprentices, veterans and other workers to enter the skilled trades. 

In Brooklyn, the $218 million Red Hook Coastal Resiliency project, delivered by Perfetto Contracting, is building a roughly two-mile system of floodwalls, floodgates, raised streets and other protections, with completion expected in 2028. 

Those projects are part of a much larger coastal construction push that also includes East Side Coastal Resiliency, Brooklyn Bridge-Montgomery Coastal Resilience and Seaport Coastal Resilience—complex, multiyear infrastructure projects requiring large crews and specialized skills.

As we've seen frequently in recent years, intense rainstorms can overwhelm New York's sewer system and flood streets far from the coast. That is leading the city to build infrastructure that can absorb, store or redirect water before it overwhelms the sewer system. 

A $95 million "cloudburst" project in Homecrest, Brooklyn, will combine porous pavement—which allows rainwater to pass through the street surface—with underground storage beneath parks and school properties. The system is designed to manage roughly 30 million gallons of stormwater annually. 

Some of this work involves relatively small crews. But other stormwater projects are major heavy-civil construction jobs. Construction is anticipated to begin this fall on the $149.5 million Tibbetts Brook Daylighting project, which will bring a long-buried Bronx stream back above ground and create a new connection to the Harlem River. 

One of the largest climate-related construction opportunities may be inside buildings that are already standing. 

Buildings account for more than two-thirds of New York City's greenhouse-gas emissions. Under Local Law 97, most buildings larger than 25,000 square feet are subject to carbon-emissions limits, with stricter standards taking effect in 2030. 

Meeting those requirements can mean substantial physical upgrades, from replacing heating and cooling equipment and improving insulation to upgrading electrical systems and converting buildings from fossil-fuel systems to electric ones. 

An analysis cited by the New York City Comptroller estimated that retrofits associated with Local Law 97 could generate $20 billion in economic activity and as many as 141,000 local jobs by 2030. Unlike a single megaproject, that work would be spread across thousands of properties, creating opportunities for general contractors and skilled tradespeople. 

New York's transition away from fossil fuels also requires something tangible: places to plug in. 

NYC DOT plans to add 600 curbside EV charging points across all five boroughs over the next three years, expanding a network that currently has 88 Level 2 charging points to nearly 700. 

The agency is working with the New York Power Authority, which is procuring equipment and construction subcontractors for the installations. DOT is also adding 92 fast-charging points and 180 Level 2 chargers at city-owned parking facilities. 

An individual charging station is hardly a megaproject. But building an electric transportation system means installing that infrastructure hundreds—and eventually potentially thousands—of times across the city. 

Some of this work will employ large union crews for years. Some will mean smaller jobs distributed across the five boroughs. But as New York spends billions protecting neighborhoods from flooding, retrofitting its building stock, redesigning streets and sewers and electrifying transportation, climate change is becoming a significant force shaping the city's construction industry. 

For New York's contractors and skilled tradespeople, building a city prepared for a changing climate could be one of the defining construction challenges—and opportunities—of the decades ahead.