Sustainable urban drainage systems planning

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Despite massive public investments in urban sewerage and drainage infrastructure over recent decades, inadequately managed urban runoff continues to have significant impacts on urban flooding and receiving water degradation. Trends in urbanization, increased quantities and degraded qualities of urban runoff and new challenges from the spectre of climate change demand that urban runoff control systems be planned, designed and managed to effect higher levels of runoff control in a demonstrably cost-effective and an adaptively managed manner. This issue is a continuous challenge to cities world wide. As an example, the City of Toronto recently (2003) completed a new Wet Weather Flow Management Master Planning exercise. Future costs of required control measures are estimated to be over $1B over the first stage of the next 25 years.69 Most of the required investment would be in hard infrastructure. This statistic could be multiplied many times over in Canada. The challenge of sustainable infrastructure planning, design and operation has faced practitioners and researchers for the past two decades. In the area of urban stormwater management, the term Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) has been coined to reflect this goal of sustainability. Although the goal of SUDS is laudable and progress towards this goal has been made, current SUDS practice goes little beyond the implementation of specific so-called Best Management Practices for rather arbitrary conditions. Current approaches do not ensure that planning decisions will yield sustainable solutions. Urban drainage infrastructure requires massive financial investments, consumes energy, generates greenhouse gases, exports significant pollutants to receiving waters, alters aquatic energy balances, and generates flows that cause flooding and degrade channels and habitats through erosion/sedimentation. Sustainable urban drainage system planning must address all of these issues within a comprehensive, systematic and integrated framework. The primary objective of the proposed research is to develop a decision support system within such a framework.