Modern urban flood and water management emphasises holistic strategies that reduce flood risk while providing cobenefits to urban economies, societies, and environments. The “Blue‐Green City” concept provides a viable framework for putting this into practice. Ningbo, is a coastal city with high flood risk, whose history as a Chinese “water town” demonstrates that approaches to water management implicit to the “Blue‐Green” concept were practiced in ancient times, and lessons can be learned from these applications. Furthermore, recent launch of the “Sponge City” campaign by China's National Government demonstrates the political will to implement sustainable flood and water management in ways consistent with the “Blue‐Green” ideals. Selection of Ningbo for a pilot project presents the opportunity to integrate new “Sponge city” approaches with ancient “Blue‐Green” principles, within the contexts of both new urban development and retrofit. Reinventing traditional approaches to urban water management and governance offers the possibility of maintaining flood risk at acceptable levels without constraining urban growth in China and other countries experiencing rapid urban development.
Sustainable municipal solid waste (MSW) management is regarded as one of the key elements for achieving urban sustainability via mitigating global climate change, recycling resources and recovering energy. Landfill is considered as the least preferable disposal method and the EU Landfill Directive (ELD) announced in 1999 requires member countries to reduce the volume of landfilled biodegradable materials. The enforcement of ELD initiated the evolution of MSW management system UK. This study depicted and assessed the transition and performance of MSW management after the millennium in Nottingham via materials flow analysis (MFA), as well as appropriately selected indicators based on the concept of waste management hierarchy and targets set in waste management regulations. We observed improvements in waste reduction, material recycling, energy recovery, and landfill prevention. During the period 2001/02 to 2016/17, annual waste generation reduced from 463 kg/Ca to 361 kg/Ca, the recycling and composting share increased from 4.6% to 44.4%, and the landfill share reduced from 54.7% to 7.3%. These signs of progress are believed to be driven by the ELD and the associated policies and waste management targets established at the national and local levels. An alternative scenario with food waste and textile separation at source and utilizing anaerobic digestion to treat separately collected organic waste is proposed at the end of this paper to fulfil the high targets set by local government and we further suggest that the recycling share may be improved by educating and supporting the public on waste separation at the sources.
Many countries encourage brownfield regeneration as a means of sustainable development but define "brownfield" differently. Specifically, the definitions of brownfield in the regeneration policies of countries with higher population densities usually promote recycling land that is previously developed, whether or not there is chemical contamination. Further, the de facto definition of brownfield used by the UK government focuses on previously developed land that is unused or underused. The ANOVA in this study revealed that local authorities in England (n = 296) with higher percentages of derelict and vacant land tended to be more deprived based on the English Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which evaluate deprivation from the aspects of income, employment, health, education, housing, crime, and living environment. However, the percentage of previously developed land in use but with further development potential had no significant effect on the deprivation conditions. The Blair-Brown Government (1997~2010) encouraged more than 60% of new dwellings to be established on the previously developed land in England. The analyses in this study showed that this target, combined with the definition of brownfield in the policy, may have facilitated higher densities of residential development on previously developed land but without addressing the deprivation problems. These observations indicate that a definition of brownfield in regeneration policies should focus on previously developed land that is now vacant or derelict if land recycling is to contribute to sustainable communities.
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