Developing and testing a cost‐effectiveness analysis to prioritize green infrastructure alternatives for climate change adaptation

Abstract

Green infrastructure has been increasingly identified as an option to help manage climate change impacts in urban areas, although its implementation is still not widely promoted in urban planning. This is because of the lack of detailed analysis for decision-makers regarding construction and maintenance costs for different types and how effective various measures are at managing precipitation at a catchment scale. This paper contributes to fill this gap in knowledge by developing a green infrastructure cost-effectiveness ranking index (GICRI) able to evaluate the stormwater runoff volume reduction of multiple green infrastructure alternatives under different climate change scenarios, over differing spatial configurations and combining this performance data with their construction and maintenance costs. After applying this model over two case study areas, this paper provides three main insights. First, climate change projections have a significant impact on green infrastructure costeffectiveness. Second, as green infrastructure cost-effectiveness is influenced by the spatial scale, there are different challenges for larger cities and smaller regional towns. Building on this, the paper argues that GICRI can be a simple and fast heuristic to increase the use of green infrastructure by informing decision-makers regarding how and where to prioritize investment or where greater modelling is needed.

Italy vs. Poland: A Comparative Analysis of Regional Planning System Attitudes toward Adaptation to Climate Changes and Green Infrastructures

“…The implementation of GI depends on: planning aspects, for example the availability of specific planning tools [63]; stakeholders' interest; institutional organization; participation and coordination [62]. A lack of financial resources hinders the planning of GIs at a local scale [65]. Matthews et al [62] argued that the planning and successful implementation of GIs as climate adaptation measures depends on biophysical and social factors, i.e., areas available for greening, species characteristics and urban morphology, but also governance aspects and involvement of citizens in decisional processes.…”

Stormwater Green Infrastructure Resilience Assessment: A Social-Ecological Framework for Urban Stormwater Management

“…However, there are tools for estimating these costs [100,101] (that may facilitate decision making regarding maintenance. New cost-effectiveness modeling approaches that link watershedscale performance with maintenance cost assessments hold promise for evaluating the role of SWGI in climate adaptation [143].…”

Editorial

“…Of course, water management entails not only the management of scarcity but also that of (unwanted) abundance. Elsewhere in this issue, Junqueria et al (2022) present a new modelling approach to evaluating the cost‐effectiveness of green infrastructure on stormwater runoff management. Importantly, their model shows the dependence of projected cost on both the specific spatial contexts and climate change projections and in doing so provides a tool for decision makers to prioritize their investments.…”