How much green roofs and rainwater harvesting systems can contribute to urban flood mitigation?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Increased urbanization combined with the intensification of short rainfall events has worsened the urban flood issue. Among the different blue-green solutions to mitigate pluvial floods, green roofs (GR) and rainwater harvesting (RWH) have been investigated as sustainable systems to reduce runoff from rooftops. Their flood mitigation capacity, however, has been estimated mostly at building-scale. Following the need to estimate discharge reduction at large scale over entire cities, we simulated the installation of (extensive, intensive and multilayer blue) GRs on flat roofs and RWH systems for sloped ones. Performances of such systems were investigated in selected cities, representing different climate regimes. Although at building-scale GRs showed higher retention capacity, the cost-efficiency analysis highlights that at large-scale RWH tanks ensure higher retention with lower costs, due to rooftop distribution. The coupled system of multilayer blue-GRs and RWH tanks guarantees a discharge reduction of 5% even during extreme events.