Stormwater Green Infrastructure Resilience Assessment: A Social-Ecological Framework for Urban Stormwater Management

Abstract

Urban areas are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Stormwater Green infrastructure (SWGI) is seen as an approach to increase the climate resilience of urban areas, because they can buffer precipitation changes brought on by climate change. However, SWGI features themselves need to be resilient to climate change to be able to contribute to the resilience of cities. Thus, we aimed to develop a SWGI resilience assessment framework that could be used to identify challenges and to inform decisionmakers’ efforts to enhance resilience. We developed a resilience assessment framework based upon a resilience matrix approach to recognize effective resilience categories for SWGI by reviewing the literature on critical functionality and barriers to implementation and operation. These categories for SWGI included policy, design, maintenance, economic factors and social factors that influence SWGI functionality. We then identified specific aspects under each category that could be used for assessing SWGI resilience, recognizing that SWGI has critical functionalities and factors controlling its viability. Unlike other SWGI assessment frameworks that are focused on ecosystem services as a final outcome, we worked from a socio-ecological perspective in order to include socio-economic and policy factors and design and planning aspects that affect service provision. Developing a resilience assessment framework is critical for management because it can reveal the specific challenges facing SWGI resilience that have traditionally been overlooked, such as maintenance and social factors. This specific framework can also lead to efficient planning and management by identifying interrelations and hierarchical relationships of categories that influence resilience. Application of this framework will rely upon expert input to connect broad dimensions with specific indicators for SWGI to local priorities in resilience planning.