Evolutionary and Holistic Assessment of Green-Grey Infrastructure for CSO Reduction

Abstract

Recent research suggests future alterations in rainfall patterns due to climate variability, affecting public safety and health in urban areas. Urban growth, one of the main drivers of change in the current century, will also affect these conditions. Traditional drainage approaches using grey infrastructure offer low adaptation to an uncertain future. New methodologies of stormwater management focus on decentralized approaches in a long-term planning framework, including the use of Green Infrastructure (GI). This work presents a novel methodology to select, evaluate, and place different green-grey practices (or measures) for retrofitting urban drainage systems. The methodology uses a hydrodynamic model and multi-objective optimization to design solutions at a watershed level. The method proposed in this study was applied in a highly urbanized watershed to evaluate the effect of these measures on Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO) quantity. This approach produced promising results and may become a useful tool for planning and decision making of drainage systems.

Methodological Framework for Analysing Cascading Effects from Flood Events: The Case of Sukhumvit Area, Bangkok, Thailand

“…As observed in [1], the level of knowledge and understanding of flood risk in a given area is directly related to people's decisions to either adjust their lives to such a risk or simply ignore it. What follows from this is that our search for sustainable flood risk mitigation in urban areas should take into consideration not only economic and technical aspects of potential solutions [12][13][14][15][16][17], but also how they interact with other objects (e.g., other urban infrastructure) and actors (e.g., utilities, government agencies, community, etc.) that co-exist in urban surroundings (e.g., [3]).…”

Combining Ecosystem Services with Cost-Benefit Analysis for Selection of Green and Grey Infrastructure for Flood Protection in a Cultural Setting

“…It has been particularly influential in Europe, and it has been associated with protective and creative measures promoted through the European Landscape Convention ( [22]) and with nature-based solutions (green infrastructure) through the European Environment Agency ( [23]). To respond to some of the great challenges such as the urbanization growth (e.g., [24,25]), inefficient drainage (and flood protection) systems, lack of biodiversity and climate change (e.g., [26]), it is required to change not only the thinking in terms of traditional flood management, which places a greater focus on grey infrastructure (pipes, concrete channels and other hard core engineering measures), but also the traditional landscape planning practice and much more on integration between the two, resulting in multifunctional green infrastructure approach (see also [14]). …”

“…However, the majority of these events, although commonly referred to as natural disasters, are, to an ever-increasing extent, directly attributable to the actions of human beings and disasters, are, to an ever-increasing extent, directly attributable to the actions of human beings and sociotechnical interactions that shape these processes (see, for example, [5][6][7][8][9]). Therefore, the search for optimal configurations of urban water infrastructure systems represents a great challenge for researchers and practitioners (e.g., [10][11][12][13][14][15]). …”

Modeling Flood Disasters: Issues Concerning Data for 2D Numerical Models

“…In doing this, collection and processing of terrain data is almost equally important as instantiation of numerical models. By acquiring reliable data and setting up appropriate models, the city managers are able to study floods and to simulate various drivers (e.g., urbanization, population growth or climate change) and effects of rehabilitation measures that they may find acceptable to stakeholders [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15].…”