Governors Island Announces Competition Winners
The Trust for Governors Island has named six winners in its Water Abundance Challenge. The competition called for projects that utilize water in strategies addressing the causes and consequences of climate change, and at the same time create good-paying jobs and foster healthier communities.
The winners include South Bronx-based Duro UAS, which will operate monitoring devices in the waters off Governors Island to measure data such as pH, dissolved oxygen, electrical conductivity, oxidation-reduction potential, and temperature, and Just EcoCities, a firm planning to construct a modular salt marsh system that will filter and reduce pollutants in New York Harbor.
Also tapped to participate are Laero, which will install equipment to treat grey water at Governors Island bathrooms, and Object Territories, a group that designs “intertidal objects”—geometrically shaped pieces of concrete installed at the shoreline, as seen in the photograph at right, that promote micro-habitats and mitigate storm surge.
The RETI Center will install BlueBlocks Gardens in the waters off Governors Island: modular, nature-based floating marshlands that allow marine habitat to thrive in and above the water (photograph below). And Seaweed City will build an urban seaweed farm and nursery, to restore the local marine ecosystems and cleanse nearby waterways.
Each of these groups will be given a site on Governors Island to demonstrate their projects for periods of six to 18 months, plus grants of up to $25,000 and access to a pool of additional funds to support implementation. An inaugural public Demo Day will be held in early summer.
The Water Abundance Challenge is part of the Center for Climate Solutions, a $700-million project that will combine interdisciplinary research on climate change with education in a single hub. In April 2023, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams announced that a partnership led by the State University of New York at Stony Brook had won a years-long competition to build the facility.
The Center for Climate Solutions’ 400,000-square-foot campus will include classrooms, laboratories, research labs, public exhibition space, student and faculty housing, university hotel rooms, and an auditorium space. More than 170,000 square feet of space will be restored within existing, historic structures such as Liggett Hall and the Fort Jay Theater. The project is slated to begin construction next year, with a projected opening date of 2028.