Achieving multifunctional, holistic and sustainable stormwater management in existing development

Urbanisation poses challenges, inter alia connected to conventional stormwater infrastructure involving risks including flooding and environmental pollution.

Transformation towards urban sustainable (storm)water management is challenging especially in established urban areas where the existing sewer network hinders transition.

The aim of this project is to support transformation in these areas by evaluating the environmental, economic and social/technical sustainability of scenarios involving different blue-green stormwater infrastructure configurations.

Each scenario will be co-developed for selected catchments in Malmö and Östersund along three scales (integrating variations in complexity, spatial, time scale) in a living lab by LTU, SLU, RI.SE, Östersund municipality and VASyd.

Given the inter-disciplinary nature of sustainable stormwater planning and management, the evaluation of these scenarios include assessments of technical-environmental functions (WP1), valuation of socio-economic multiple benefits (WP2), and strategic management/governance (WP3).

These will be inter-connected in a sustainability assessment framework (WP4) with WP5 synthesing outputs to inform development of evidence based recommendations for successful transformation towards sustainable, multifunctional urban stormwater management plans.

The societal benefit of this project is illustrated by its contribution to various SDGs, specifically SGD 6 and 11, but also SDGs 3, 9, 8, 12, 13 and 14.