SAI-P: Optimizing Deployment of Green Stormwater Infrastructure for Maximum Benefit

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership.

To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.

Stormwater runoff is a major source of water pollution and flooding in cities. To help manage these problems, many communities are turning to practices like rain gardens, bioswales, or soil amendments that reduce and treat stormwater runoff by mimicking natural hydrologic processes. These “green infrastructure” practices are cost-effective and can provide multiple social, economic, and health benefits when implemented in strategic locations within a watershed.

However, the public land owned by government agencies charged with managing stormwater may not be sufficient to meet watershed targets. Developing effective strategies for engaging residents and incentivizing adoption of green infrastructure on private land is a top priority. This SAI planning project focuses on how municipalities and government agencies can optimally allocate their resources to equitably distribute and maximize the benefits of stormwater management to society.

This SAI planning project brings together stakeholders in a major region of the country to define the challenges surrounding green infrastructure implementation. A major goal is to prioritize the social, behavioral, economic, policy, and/or hydrologic research needed to develop more effective and equitable green infrastructure strategies. This project focuses primarily on bringing together a diverse range of stakeholders, including local governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who work with homeowners to install green infrastructure, and basic science researchers.

These groups participate in half-day meetings during the project period. Between meetings, additional information is gathered on one or more local areas of interest to guide more focused discussions of potential research directions. To include feedback from stakeholder groups and perspectives beyond the local area, a special session is hosted at a larger regional meeting.

The planning activity culminates in a comprehensive research plan that addresses the most pressing challenges in implementing effective and equitable green infrastructure.

This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences and the Directorate for Geosciences.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.