Using human health disparities and salmon health to guide spatial prioritization of green stormwater infrastructure

Abstract

Stormwater pollution is pervasive in urban environments and has negative consequences for both the people and ecosystems that occur within these regions. These pollutants cause mortality and other forms of harm in aquatic ecosystems. In the human landscape, stormwater pollution is detrimental to human health and unfairly impacts communities of color and people of lower socioeconomic status. While the sources of stormwater pollution are clear, the solutions can be costly and need to be placed intentionally to target benefits to both human and wildfire. Multi-objective planning is an important tool for being strategic about making decisions for prioritization to ensure that multiple benefits are achieved. We provide a case study regarding the consequences of multi-objective prioritization using both human health disparities and salmon distribution. We used a risk-assessment framework to evaluate human and salmon health goals on three different opportunities for stormwater mitigation to compare the outcomes from different management decisions. Our results indicated that using a dual objective prioritization that includes human health and equity in addition to salmon health provides very similar outcomes when compared to including just a single goal. Using a single objective can limit the ability of stormwater mitigation projects to provide co-benefits. Only limited trade-offs were found when incorporating equity and environmental justice into planning decisions that typically include only water quality or ecosystem health into the decision-making process. Our methods can provide a framework for practitioners to expand their scope of work and ensure that solutions are more equitable.