10 Water Talks - Big Five :Rohit Aggarwala

Episode Notes

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

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Om Podcasten

Water is fundamental! That’s why, for the first time in 47 years, the UN organized a worldwide conference on water in 2023, hosted by the Netherlands and Tajikistan. Will it help? To find out, Tracy Metz spoke to all sorts of people in New York and the Netherlands - artists, activists, urban designers, students, officials - who all share the same sense of urgency as we are confronted with too much water or too little, too dirty and … too unequal. This… is ‘Water Talks’! This podcast is made possible by the Dutch Ministry of Water and Infrastructure (I&W).