DON’T PANIC.

RENATURED: CLIMATE CHANGE INTERVENTION

Kristina Budelis, Pedro Galvao, Brian Clifton & Arielle Hein

DRIVING QUESTION

How can we make the effects of the climate crisis feel more urgent and imaginable?

Rising sea levels brought on by climate change pose serious threats to coastal communities and natural resources worldwide. In New York, relative sea level rise is historically greater than the global average, and over half of New Yorkers currently live in marine coastal counties. With a rapid ice melt scenario, sea levels could rise over 4 feet in coastline NYC by the 2080s. By making such projections more visible on our urban landscape, we hope to provoke discussion.

http://www.dec.ny.gov/energy/45202.html
http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/

CONTEXT

INTENT

We hope the piece will make the effects of climate change—which often seem so distant and abstract—more concrete and imaginable on our shared urban coastline by amplifying projections of
sea level rise.

The operation we focused on for this project was amplification.

WHAT WE MADE

We created water level markers in increments of 40 years that we posted on the sides of buildings located in areas that will be affected as the sea level rises. We intentionally created the markers at a dramatic scale in order to amplify their effect.

Adjacent to the markers, we placed a red emergency box that contained a lifejacket and a large label that read “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS.”

We also had a plaque that outlined a "Sea Level Rise Survival Plan."