How do we inform planners, stormwater designers and engineers, waterway managers, and decision makers to ensure urban development doesn’t negatively impact waterways?
We need to formalise our approaches because we know that excess stormwater runoff leads to the urban stream syndrome, a worldwide phenomenon that degrades the physical, ecological and social values of waterways.
In addition, wastewater treatment plants can significantly increase discharge to waterways. To address this increase in flow volume, and altered flow pattern, requires evaluation and amelioration of streamflow impacts. Drawing upon non-urban analogues the development of the Urban Streamflow Impact Assessment (USIA) was led by Streamology with CTEnvironmental, Melbourne University and Sydney Water.
USIA enables explicit links to be made between stormwater runoff characteristics and waterway values (social, ecological and geomorphic), through streamflow metrics. USIA has been predominantly applied in the rapidly urbanising western Sydney to inform future development scenarios, including ‘business-as-usual’ relative to ambitious Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD), and includes outputs such as stormwater targets and risk matrices.
USIA can be applied across urbanising and urban catchments to provide explicit input to controls that inform urban planning and drainage design, i.e. what flows to keep out of the waterway. Most recently, the USIA method won the ‘research and innovation’ award with both Stormwater Victoria and Stormwater NSW, and was the runner up at the Stormwater Australia awards.
This webinar is sponsored by Streamology.