How 900+ leaders helped turn bold concepts like Blue Highways into pathways for implementation
The Waterfront Alliance 2026 Waterfront Conference, Future-Proofing Our Waterfronts, brought together more than 900 participants and 85 speakers at a critical moment for climate resilience.
As climate impacts accelerate and uncertainty around political will and funding grows, this year’s conference was designed not just as a forum for discussion, but as a catalyst for action: creating space to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and identify practical pathways forward.
A clear example was the conference’s focus on Blue Highways, which is an emerging strategy to leverage New York City’s waterways for freight movement, congestion reduction, and climate resilience.
From Vision to Viability
The conversation began with Corridor Resilience: Blue/Green Networks for Urban Adaptation, a panel exploring how blue highways and greenways can function as a unified resilience system.
Moderated by Paul Lipson, Co-Principal of Barretto Bay Strategies, the discussion brought together leaders from New York City Economic Development Corporation, Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, U.S. Coastal Service, and Empire Clean Cities to examine how connected land-and-water corridors could support freight, mobility, and ecological resilience.
Panelists highlighted both opportunity and complexity:
- Integrating waterborne freight with land-based micromobility networks
- Building on early pilot momentum while addressing infrastructure gaps
- Navigating fragmented governance and uncertain market incentives
- Balancing working waterfront needs with public access and ecological restoration
Rather than presenting Blue Highways as a finished solution, the panel framed it as a promising concept that requires deeper collaboration and coordination to scale.
From Conversation to Co-Creation
That conversation moved directly into action through the interactive roundtable, Blue Highways in Action: Removing Barriers, Advancing a Systemwide Network.
Participants worked across sectors to identify barriers and develop recommendations focused on three priorities:
- Activating the Private Sector: Participants explored what it will take to move Blue Highways from pilot projects to market viability, identifying the need for stronger market confidence and early private-sector adoption.
- Strengthening Infrastructure and Public Sector Capacity: Discussions highlighted underutilized waterfront assets while surfacing challenges around competing land uses, spatial constraints, and agency capacity.
- Reforming Policy and Governance: Participants identified fragmented permitting, outdated regulations, and limited systemwide coordination as major barriers, while pointing to opportunities for both near-term streamlining and long-term reform.
Turning Ideas Into Action
Together, the panel and roundtable reflected a central goal of the 2026 Waterfront Conference: bridging bold ideas and implementation.
The process was intentional: introducing systems-level concepts, stress-testing them in real time, and generating concrete next steps. By the end of the session, momentum was building toward continued cross-sector collaboration to advance Blue Highways beyond the conference.
Across all sessions, one message was clear: the future of waterfront resilience depends on connecting systems, aligning institutions, and acting collectively.
The 2026 Waterfront Conference showed that when designed intentionally, convenings like this can do more than spark ideas – they can accelerate the partnerships and momentum needed to bring them to life.
