Integrating Green and Grey Infrastructure for Resilience Enhancement of Conventional Urban Drainage System and its Evaluation through Modeling

Abstract

High urbanization rate and climate change are the main drivers of urban floods in developing countries. The increase in urban flooding incidents has become a significant threat to cities, which also result into considerable losses of life and the economy. Adapting to the risks of a changing climate and ill-effects of urbanization is imperative for national and local governments. This calls for a functionally and structurally resilient urban drainage infrastructure. Functional resilience is the coping capacity of system against external threats such as urbanization and climate change, whereas structural resilience is the resilience against internal failures such as blockage of inlets or sewers, structural damage of a pipe, bed load sediment deposition, asset aging/decay, and sewer collapse. This work aims to understand the impact of nature-based solutions on urban drainage resilience. Various researchers have identified Low Impact development (LID) practices as a potential solution to enhance drainage systems' resilience. LID can be defined as a land development and retrofit strategy that emphasizes the protection and use of distributed interventions to reduce the volume and rate of stormwater runoff from a developed landscape. In the present study, the green roofs and rain gardens are simulated in a part of Gurugram city of India using the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) 5.2. Sensitivity analysis is conducted to overcome the problem of a lack of in-depth data to perform model calibration and validation. The simulations were carried out by developing various scenarios for functional and structural resilience assessment. The results indicate that if 25% of potential subcatchments are deployed with LIDs, functional resiliency of the system enhances by 25%, and structural resilience of vulnerable nodes decreases by 17%.  The study reveals that introduction of LIDs aids into enhancing the functional resilience of the system rather than structural resilience. This research provides evidence of LIDs' positive influence on the resilience performance of drainage systems. Overall, the study can help urban planners and drainage management engineers to develop understanding on LIDs role vis-à-vis city's resilience to urban flood problems.