Abstract
Many urban areas around the world are facing increasing pressure on stormwater management systems due to urbanization and extreme weather events caused by climate change. Low impact development (LID), including blue-green infrastructure such as rain gardens, has become an attractive addition to traditional gray infrastructure for managing stormwater. Municipalities have a limited suite of policy instruments for incentivizing installation of LID on private property. We built a system dynamics model of integrated socio-economic and hydrologic systems in Oslo, Norway to illustrate implementation of two economic incentive mechanisms: subsidies based on reverse auctions and stormwater fees. We find that policy effectiveness depends on 1) communicating realistic expectations of LID performance to landowners and 2) municipal subsidies to reach landowners without intrinsic interests in LID. Under certain conditions, lower municipal economic incentives can outperform higher economic incentives and lead to sustained long-term adoption of LID on private property.
Highlights
Stormwater runoff and urban flooding are an increasing threat in built environments around the world
Conse quently, some of the initially non-attracted households develop interest in Low impact development (LID) and a fraction of them are motivated to become adopters by the subsidy. This scenario demonstrates that high subsidies together with an effective advertising campaign that clearly communicates realistic ex pectations for LID as a stormwater management solution within the likely climate scenario leads to timely realization of full LID adoption potential
This set of scenarios demonstrates the effect of implementing the stormwater fee (SWF), which is set to a reference value of 800 Norwegian kroner (NOK)/ household/year, together with the reverse auction-based subsidy
Summary
Stormwater runoff and urban flooding are an increasing threat in built environments around the world. Through taking an integrated approach, we focus on the economic and social aspects of stormwater infrastructure adoption, with consideration of ecological and technological aspects. While demographic characteristics such as age and education level can influence adoption (Shin & McCann, 2018), social aspects of LID implementation include access to information, monetary consid erations, personal experiences, and influence from neighbors. Even when provided at no monetary cost, LID requires a certain degree of modification to the property, to which a household might not agree if it has opportunity costs or non-monetary inconveniences (Londono Cadavid & Ando, 2013; Shin & McCann, 2018)
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