2026 Theses Master's

Energy Infrastructure Vulnerability in New York City: A Multi-Method Analysis of Flood Exposure, Social Vulnerability, and Climate Resilience Policy

Liu, Xi (Catherine)

Coastal flooding threatens urban energy infrastructure, but the communities most exposed to infrastructure failure are not necessarily those that receive the most protection. Research on flood exposure, social vulnerability, and post-disaster governance has developed along separate tracks, and whether resilience planning corresponds to the geography of compound risk has not been systematically tested. This study applies a multi-scalar vulnerability framework to New York City, analyzing infrastructure exposure, community social conditions, and governance response as three distinct dimensions of the same flood risk problem.

The infrastructure analysis maps the flood exposure of 196 energy facilities across four scenarios, from current FEMA regulatory boundaries to New York City Panel on Climate Change end-of-century sea level rise projections, and applies Local Moran's I to detect spatial clusters and isolated high-risk nodes. The community analysis constructs a PCA-based social vulnerability score for all 2,324 census tracts and crosses it with FEMA National Risk Index coastal flood data to classify tracts into a four-category burden typology. The governance analysis measures thematic emphasis and geographic specificity across a 674,000-word corpus of 13 post-Sandy planning documents published between 2013 and 2025.

The three scales of analysis point in the same direction. At the infrastructure scale, 10.7% of facilities fall within current FEMA flood zones, and 38.8% fall within end-of-century inundation boundaries. The largest jump happens before mid-century, and most of the newly exposed facilities are not currently required to adapt under existing federal standards. At the community scale, 128 census tracts (5.5%) are Compound Vulnerable, meaning they combine high social disadvantage with coastal flood exposure. These tracts experienced the same physical flooding during Hurricane Sandy as other exposed tracts. The difference between them is social, not physical. At the governance scale, policy attention does not follow this geography. Rockaway, Coney Island, and Jamaica Bay dominate the corpus, while Mott Haven-Port Morris, where infrastructure exposure and social disadvantage converge most sharply, appears only four times across twelve years of planning text. All four mentions are incidental, and no document contains a project commitment, risk assessment, or planning recommendation directed at this neighborhood.

The multi-scalar framework reveals a pattern that no single-scale analysis can produce. The places where compound risk is highest are systematically underrepresented in the documents through which resilience investment is planned. Governance is not just a policy context for urban flood risk. It is a structural determinant of who receives planning attention, and by extension, protective investment. The geographic grounding ratio developed in this study provides a way to measure whether equity language in planning documents is anchored to specific places or remains at the level of principle.

Keywords: multi-scalar vulnerability framework; coastal flood risk; urban energy infrastructure; social vulnerability; post-disaster governance; policy discourse analysis; New York City