This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes. This is a conversation with Rohit Aggarwala, the Chief Climate Officer of New York City and the commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. He trained as a historian and worked as a journalist and as a consultant at McKinsey before going to work for the former Mayor Bloomberg as the head of the office of long-term Planning and Sustainability. He is deeply invested in using storm protection measures to not just build walls, but to make the city a better place for the people who live there, to give the city what he calls ‘a livable waterfront’. I spoke with him about the city’s sewers, about making the city more resilient with measures ranging from seawalls to rain gardens, and about the water around New York, which has gotten so clean that there are even dolphins swimming in it. LINKS: ROHIT AGGARWALA PlanNYC

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes.

This is a conversation with Kate Orff. She has her own studio, Scape, and is a professor at Columbia University in New York. Time Magazine called her one of the 100 most important people of 2023. She coined the term ‘Oyster-Tecture’, a method of using oyster shells to create ‘living breakwaters’ that not only help clean the water of New York Harbor, but also will help calm the waves during the next superstorm. You can hear her in episode 4 of Water Talks, ‘Too Dirty’. This is the longer version of my interview with her during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023.

LINKS: KATE ORFF

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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Shownotes: This is the Big Five, the companion series to the podcast Water Talks, with five one-on-one interviews with some of the extraordinary speakers from the main episodes.

Matthijs Bouw is a Dutch architect and urban designer who has lived in New York now for eight years. With his studio One Architecture he is working on ‘The Big U’, ten miles of infrastructure works around the tip of Manhattan which are not only meant to protect the island from storms, but also to provide the local communities with valuable public space. In addition, Matthijs is a professor of climate resilience at Penn University and the first Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation. You can hear him in episode 2 of Water Talks, ‘Too Much’. This is the longer version of my interview with him during the New York Water Week and the UN Water conference in 2023. Links: Matthijs Bouw The Big U Project

"Image Credit: Rebuild by Design/The BIG Team.”

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