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Project Plan Summary
Redesigning the American Neighborhood:
Cost effectiveness of interventions in storm water management at different scales
1.1
Background: In natural environments rain falls on dense vegetation in woods or
meadows. The plants absorb the impact of the water, part of which is then filtered through soils
before reaching groundwater below, and eventually, receiving waters such as streams and ponds.
This natural process is relatively slow compared to the hydrodynamics in developed
environments, where overland flow over impervious areas prevails. Typically, when rain falls on
traditionally developed areas, a variety of engineered systems collect, concentrate, and then
abruptly discharge the storm water into local receiving waters. The hydrologic cycle is, to a large
degree, accelerated and the rain water accumulates contaminants, including suspended
sediments, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, and pathogens that may impair the uses of the receiving
waters.
A common response to these impairments is to construct centralized engineered facilities to treat
the storm water. This strategy has associated short-term economic costs and benefits that are
relatively easy to quantify. However, there are also long-term ecological, and especially social,
costs and benefits that are often not as easy to quantify. In the case of a centrally-located
detention ponds, for example, the economic costs for construction can easily be compared to the
benefits gained in protection of downstream values in receiving waters. Similarly, the short-term
environmental benefits are well known (e.g. contaminant settling and discharge reduction).
However, some costs (e.g. lack of protection of upstream receiving waters, failure to protect
against some impairments, like pathogens) are harder to assess. Furthermore, the social benefits
of this option are rarely explored. For example, is a detention basin really the best option, or is it
just the easiest one to implement from a social perspective (e.g. it avoids a ‘not in my backyard’
response)?
Alternatively, one might consider intervening to reduce storm water impairments of receiving
waters by managing the immediate sources of the impairments. For example, water collected on
roofs of buildings could be filtered through constructed wetlands, or parking lot runoff might be
directed through a series of swales set between the parking lot and a receiving water body. Green
roofs are another eco-technology adapted for large flat top buildings. Here the building is planted
with low maintenance roof top gardens that absorb moisture, filter the rainwater and release it
more slowly into the surrounding environment. The roof top garden has the secondary benefits of
reducing heating and cooling loads within the building and reducing the atmospheric heating
impact of the building on local climate.
We assert that there is no single, all-encompassing, centralized solution for storm water
management in developed watersheds. Rather, each watershed has numerous potential points of
intervention. Intervention can occur at several different levels, including the household,
farmstead, city block, mall, industrial park, and roadway. Using a diverse palette of ideas,
technologies, engineering approaches and organisms, it is possible to change each of these
components of medium density neighborhoods to lessen and manage storm water impacts.
Furthermore, while we can’t ‘engineer’ people to behave differently, we can develop ways to
include home owners, developers and other stakeholders in participatory processes that include
regulators and researchers. There is overwhelming evidence that this process of shared learning
is probably the most critical element to ensure long-term acceptance and success in any
watershed-level management effort (Blumenthal and Jannink 2000, Costanza et al. 2002,
Mendoza and Prabhu 2000, Goma et al. 2001).
The fundamental philosophy of ecological design is to substitute information, mostly from the
natural world, for costly hardware and ‘hard’ engineering. The challenge is to communicate and
demonstrate the importance and effectiveness of ecological design in watershed rehabilitation
through participatory adaptive management. The purpose of this project is to develop tools
that will allow stakeholders, regulators, and researchers to visualize alternative future
environmental states that they imagine collectively and then to optimize the mix of
interventions at various scales, that will best balance environmental and social, as well as
economic, criteria.
1.2
Primary Objective/Goal: Quantify the balances among environmental, economic, and
social costs and benefits for storm water management at whole-watershed, neighborhood, and
individual house scales in a typical New England landscape and climate.
1.3
Secondary (Working) Objectives: We propose to focus our research efforts on storm
water management issues that are the consequence of rapid development in South Burlington,
Vermont. South Burlington is representative of towns throughout northern New England where
‘sprawl’ either has impaired or threatens to impair the quality of surface waters. Staff in the
South Burlington Planning Office are seeking innovative alternatives to traditional storm water
management technologies and have been proactive in identifying potential points of intervention
and sources of funding for selected implementation projects. Thus, there are excellent
opportunities to leverage these UVM research funds with South Burlington project
implementation funds in collaborative research by management experiments, particularly in the
Potash Brook Watershed, a focal point for recent storm water management controversies.
We propose to focus on the following secondary/working objectives:
a.
Assessment: Develop a framework to assess opportunities for intervention in adaptive
storm water management at various spatial scales and apply this framework to the
Potash Brook case study.
b.
Evaluation: Complete a comparative cost/benefit analysis of the alternatives identified
for the case study in Objective #1 which accounts for environmental and
social/community factors as well as purely economic factors. Identify potential marketbased incentives that could facilitate implementation of the identified alternatives.
c.
Participation: Involve community stakeholders in the development and evaluation of
Objectives #1 and #2 through ‘town or neighborhood meetings’ that rely on wholewatershed visualization tools and multi-criteria decision aids to promote shared learning
among the project participants.
d.
Implementation: Initiate a demonstration project that can be used as a focal point to test
ideas and designs generated by Objectives #1-3.