Green Infrastructure Collaborative—The Resources
 |
As we saw yesterday, members of the Green Infrastructure Collaborative have made significant commitments to providing a range of practical support and resources designed to advance the implementation of green infrastructure. While many of these commitments involve future actions, several Collaborative members already provide helpful tools, studies, reports, and other valuable resources. Here’s a sampling of these diverse offerings.
For communities that need to build a case for green infrastructure, the publication, “Banking on Green: A Look at How Green Infrastructure Can Save Municipalities Money and Provide Economic Benefits Community-Wide,” is a gold mine of information. The 44-page publication is available from the conservation organization American Rivers, and was jointly prepared by American Rivers, the Water Environment Federation, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and ECONorthwest. The report not only looks at the benefits of green infrastructure but also at how it compares to traditional “grey infrastructure” in cost and cost-effectiveness.
Attend the Greening Your Infrastructure webinar on March 26 to help you meet challenging regulatory requirements and accomplish your environmental sustainability objectives. Learn more.
Maintaining compliance with stormwater regulations is another major area of concern for communities, and a 2011 report to the EPA from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) can help. The report, Investigation of the Feasibility and Benefits of Low-Impact Site Design Practices Applied to Meet Various Potential Stormwater Runoff Regulatory Standards, investigated “the degree to which low-impact development (LID) practices can meet or exceed the requirements of various potential stormwater management facility design standards and to determine the environmental benefits that can be realized by applying these techniques.” The study assessed five urban land use types, including three residential, one retail commercial, and one infill redevelopment, placing each in four climate regions throughout the continental United States and on two regionally common soil types.
For those wondering which type or types of green infrastructure may work best, taking a look at what worked in other cities can be a good place to start. One compendium of such information is the report Rooftops to Rivers II, published in 2011 by the NRDC. The report takes a detailed look at real-world case studies in 14 different North American cities that are green infrastructure leaders. In the 2013 update to the report, the NRDC looks at the cities profiled in 2011 and how they have improved their green infrastructure policies and programs during the 2-year period. The NRDC uses its “Emerald City” rating system that “identifies key actions that cities should take to maximize green infrastructure investment.”
Greening Your Infrastructure: Smart Approaches to Achieving Sustainable Practices While Meeting EPA Standards
In just 90 minutes you’ll learn how to green up your infrastructure in a way that helps you meet challenging regulatory requirements and accomplish your environmental sustainability objectives. Register today!
To further help in the decision-making process, several modeling tools are available to “predict the water quality and water quantity impacts of green infrastructure approaches.” These tools help users to access multiple designs to determine cost and/ or performance estimates and, for each, the EPA summarizes best management practices, data requirements, and outputs. Modeling tools are available for analysis on different scales—from a single site to a watershed to a city. There are both simple modeling tools that require limited data and technical expertise and that should be used as screening and planning-level tools and complex modeling tools requiring more extensive data and a higher level of technical expertise. These models “generally include more mechanistic representations of physical processes and, therefore, require the user to define a larger number of physical parameters.”
Of course, one of the biggest challenges for any infrastructure project is that of funding, and the EPA has a full menu of green infrastructure funding resources, including information from other agencies and regional funding sources. Included are loans and grants, tax incentive programs, and tools to help with such things as planning, goal setting, and phasing and for comparing different financing options for specific projects.
All of these resources and more are available via the Green Infrastructure Collaborative’s website at http://water.epa.gov/infrastructure/greeninfrastructure/gi_partners.cfm#resources.