Using this framework can help understand the costs and benefits of applying green infrastructure principles to hard infrastructure like bridges and estuary walls. As businesses operate as part of a community, communities can also benefit from these investments in GI
Research Council: NERC
Domestic gardens offer a valuable source of green infrastructure (GI) within an urban environment. They are important patches of greenspace that can provide connectivity between larger areas of GI (parks, recreation grounds etc), therefore improving the functioning of ecosystems and the services they provide, such as reducing surface water runoff thereby reducing flood risk, and lowering urban temperatures. While individually, a domestic garden may appear insignificant, collectively domestic gardens contribute up to 30% of greenspace within the urban matrix, which becomes especially important at the city scale. Furthermore, the general public are often unaware of the environmental value of their own private garden and how they can improve it.
Research Council: NERC
Blue-Green infrastructure aimed to increase understanding of people’s perceptions and provide a methodology for the robust evaluation of the multiple functionalities of Blue-Green infrastructure which demonstrates the relative significance of benefits in context specific locations. This tool compliments CIRIA BeST (Benefits of SuDS Tool), and the team are now embarking on a new EPSRC-funded research project – Achieving Urban Flood Resilience in an Uncertain Future
Research Council: EPSRC
A digital e-learning tool that encourages flood risk adaptation amongst SMEs. This interactive Web-2 app allows users to communicate with other businesses, share their views and experiences, access key resources and learn from a range of people who have flood experience or expertise. Business people shared their learning about how to run a business in a flood risk area, and on different aspects of their adaptive strategies. The storytelling process was found to encourage critical reflections on business adaptation, decision making and experiential learning that could be usefully shared with other small businesses.
Research Council: EPSRC
Our intent is to work out and demonstrate how resilience to floods and droughts can be achieved using integrated systems of Blue-Green and Grey assets, no matter how climate changes in future, assuring continuous, long term service delivery.
Research Council: EPSRC
ADDED BONUS OF GI for people: access to health and wellbeing benefits is not shared equally amongst the population, particularly in urban areas. People aged 65 and over are most likely to suffer from poor health, yet this group may be the least likely to benefit from green infrastructure (GI).
Research Council: NERC
The river or watercourse is a natural or semi-natural corridor or infrastructure element. Rivers are part of this green network, which has the potential to provide higher resilience and cost-effectiveness as well as more social and environmental benefits than conventional infrastructure. This research brings together the strategic arguments and the technical information needed to support the selection of GI approaches and, through a series of case studies, provides evidence on construct-ability, engineering performance and environmental and social benefits.
Research Council: NERC
Despite a wealth of scientific understanding on the importance of GI, the implementation and uptake of GI in new developments in the UK is lacking. It is envisaged that the approach implemented in this project will be adopted by other organisations and stakeholders, and in doing so, will help multi-functional GI-based solutions to become part of business-as-usual city growth in new developments.
Research Council: NERC
A project with particular relevance for SMEs, it explore stormwater management and prediction of the runoff response from a green roof for any arbitrary rainfall time series.
Research Council: Other
With rainfall projected to increase under future climate conditions, research has shown that domestic front gardens play a pivotal role in the control of surface water following heavy rainfall. If you have an outdoor area or parking spaces for your clients, then impermeable paving can generate substantial volumes of runoff during a storm even which can contribute to localised flooding.
Research Council: Other