A National Scale Model of Green Infrastructure for Water Resources

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Can green infrastructure form part of a water resources plan? How can we evaluate where the most impact from new wetlands and forests can be made? How robust are these 'natural water retention methods' (NWRM) to climate change? How much will they cost in comparison to conventional methods?These questions are currently being answered in a local context, with case studies and pilot projects well established and their outputs understood. At the national scale there has been far less work done. No model has taken the outputs of individual NWRM and formed a generalised approach which can be used to identify the costs and benefits of a range of options for new NWRM across Great Britain and mapped solutions in financial and carbon terms. This work builds on existing expertise on water resource systems modelling planning within the Oxford research group and uses the existing knowledge of project partners.The main steps in our project are:1. Explore the knowledge of our project partners on NWRM. We will host discussions on the sites where NWRM has been used and record the accounts of how these schemes have been developed through interviewing expert project partners. We will ask about: -The cost of building, the time taken to develop the sites, and the operational costs. -The impacts that they noticed or monitored on local riversWe will compare the answers we are given with information from reports from elsewhere in the world.2. Using this information we will make a model of the effects of NWRM on water. This will involve looking at what information on each NWRM can tell us about what the impact on water resources is going to be. 3. Having made a model of individual NWRM, we will apply this to our existing model of water resources for mainland Great Britain. This determines future available supplies and demands for each water resource zone, the management units for water resources. 4. We will investigate how climate change and population will affect the answers from Objective 3, and look at other uncertain factors such as how energy and industry demand for water might change and what happens if people use less water in future.5. We will work with our partners throughout the project to develop practical and useful reports on our work.