Selecting Multi-Functional Green Infrastructure to Enhance Resilience Against Urban Floods

Abstract

Climate change and population growth are increasing pressure on urban drainage infrastructure, incrementing the level of flood risk in particular in urban areas. Traditional approaches to cope with urban floods offer low adaptation capacity to the uncertain future. As a response, the use of sustainable drainage measures, also called green infrastructure (GI), have been increasingly suggested in the last years. One important reason for their increasing popularity has been the multiple benefits that they offer to the environment. These benefits include environmental and socio-economic aspects, besides sustainable stormwater management. However, an important restriction for GI application in urban areas is the difficulty of decision making. These difficulties to select innovative drainage technologies are based mainly on lack of information and physical complexity of urban drainage systems. Moreover, there are many types of GI with particular characteristics, requirements and limitations. This work proposes a procedure for selection of promising sustainable measures to cope with urban floods, considering local constraints and environmental aspects through the evaluation and integration of multiple benefits. In order to facilitate the application of the proposed methodology, the process has been coded into a software program. The method is tested in two case study sites in Thailand to prove its effectiveness. The outcome of this work is seen as a useful approach for helping decision making processes with the aim of reducing urban flood risk in a sustainable way, allowing the improvement of other environmental aspects.