Urban Resilience
Urban resilience is about protecting human health during heatwaves, keeping homes dry during floods, lowering insurance bills, and creating new, good-paying jobs that future-proof our workforce.
Alongside our incredible partners, we’re building tools, training leaders, and testing solutions that make communities stronger, safer, and more prepared for the effects of climate change.
Climate Tech Incubation
We help critical innovations advance toward market at the pace necessary to address the climate crisis. By partnering with early-stage innovators, growth-stage companies, and everyone in between, we are lowering barriers to market. Our approach, including fellowships, innovation challenges, piloting infrastructure, and connections to capital matches urban resilience needs with scalable climate tech solutions, creating pathways for technologies that can transform how cities mitigate and adapt to climate impacts.
NYCHA Resident Climate Action Grants
This program, presented in partnership with the Public Housing Community Fund, supports 35 resident-led climate action and sustainability projects. The Exchange offers grant funding and technical assistance directly to residents in New York City’s public housing and PACT developments. Save the date for the NYCHA Resident Climate Action Grants Showcase being planned for Climate Week NYC in September 2026!
The Climate Story Project
The Exchange will launch The Climate Story Project at Climate Week NYC 2025. With support from the Wellcome Trust, we’re collecting and sharing diverse personal stories about how climate change affects human health. Through a growing digital archive, live events, and in-person workshops, the project harnesses the power of storytelling to make climate science accessible and actionable. The initiative brings together partner organizations, including WE ACT, NYU, and Billion Oyster Project to ensure authentic community voices are heard and amplified.
Oceans & Coastal Resilience
The beauty of our oceans draws communities to coastlines, while their increasing force threatens millions of people who live, work, and recreate near them. Cities, like NYC, face mounting risks from tidal flooding to sea level rise, which require them to adapt their built and natural environments to protect residents. Building resilience in these environments requires collaboration between scientists, community leaders, policymakers, and innovators. Here’s how we’re convening diverse communities to develop climate solutions that address ocean health and protect coastal cities.
Climate Solutions Summit NYC
The Exchange hosted its second annual Climate Solutions Summit NYC on April 17, 2026, ahead of Earth Day. The event was focused on climate data and brought together scientists, community leaders, policymakers, and innovators to discuss what's working in climate data and how we can shape new approaches to make climate data useful and actionable for all.
AI Innovation for Resilience
Organized by The Exchange, Pace University, and IBM, this competition invited student teams from our partner universities to design stormwater management solutions for NYC using AI. The winning team, “Hydro Heroes” from Georgia Tech, created a flood monitoring system using traffic camera video feeds and social media posts to integrate information on flooding severity and public sentiments into a centralized dashboard to increase public safety and reduce flood damage. SoMAS, from Stony Brook University, presented "eFlood," a mobile app that integrates flood sensor data and resident feedback to offer safe travel routes for people moving through the city during storms.
Energy Resilience
The need for sustainable batteries has never been more urgent. Battery demand has surged by approximately 33% annually over the past 30 years, with last year being the most significant increase yet. To meet this demand, it has never been more critical to establish a sustainable and economically viable secondary market for electric vehicle (EV) batteries to reduce the demand for mining minerals and support the clean energy transition.
Building off of an Ideas Lab we hosted last summer, The Exchange’s latest initiative, Project Closed Circuit, aims to cultivate a robust circular economy that advances a secondary market for EV batteries in urban centers.
Design Exchange: Innovations for a Changing Climate
This new event series brings together architects, urban planners, and climate experts to explore innovative design solutions for New York's most pressing climate challenges—from mass timber construction to extreme heat mitigation strategies.
These collaborative discussions, led by the Municipal Art Society of New York and Pratt Institute, foster cross-sector partnerships that translate cutting-edge research and climate tech into practical interventions that protect communities and strengthen the city's ability to prepare for and adapt to climate impacts.