The Stormwater Report

Effective stormwater management requires participation from private landowners who help prevent runoff and flooding in their communities by building household-scale green infrastructure (GI). However, outreach efforts to spur wider GI construction often take a “one-size-fits-all” approach, failing to consider the site-level social, financial, and ecological factors that influence specific landowners’ decisions to implement GI. The […]

When President Trump signed into law the America’s Water Infrastructure Act (S. 3021) on Oct. 23 , a special federal stormwater financing task force was created. The Water  Environment Federation (WEF; Alexandria, Va.) and the National Municipal Stormwater Alliance (NMSA; Alexandria, Va.) have proposed and advocated for this task force during  the last year. The […]

The Water Environment Federation is enthusiastically soliciting research, technology, operations, regulatory, environmental, communications and management abstracts to develop oral and poster presentations, panel discussions, and pre-conference workshops at the WEF Stormwater and Green Infrastructure Symposium 2019: Integrated Stormwater Management. Download the WEF Stormwater and GI Symposium Call for Abstracts. This symposium is crafted to deepen […]

Starting in early 2017, citizens curious about how Chicago’s bioswales and porous asphalt handled storms could log on and watch real-time data upload to their screens. Though the portal is no longer being updated, the test project it represented was a success. This May, the City Tech Collaborative, based at the UI LABS nonprofit research […]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) annual Campus RainWorks Challenge is now accepting registrants until Sept. 30. This annual competition seeks to engage with the next generation of environmental professionals; foster a dialogue about effective stormwater management; and showcase the environmental, economic, and social benefits of green infrastructure practices. To participate in this competition, teams […]

Located along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans’ low-lying Gentilly neighborhood has been a hotbed of flood-control innovation in recent years. As the city’s first “resilience district,” municipal government organizations are collaborating to invest more than $140 million into Gentilly to demonstrate groundbreaking pilot projects that address the area’s chronically stressed drainage systems and […]

As natural water sources dwindle, communities across California increasingly rely on imported water. Climate change soon could make water supplies even more scarce. While experts predict droughts in the region to become more common, rainfall also is expected to become heavier and more frequent. A report released by the Pacific Institute (Oakland, Calif.) in June […]

The National Green Infrastructure Certification Program (NGICP), the first standardized job-training program in the U.S. for professionals working in green infrastructure construction, maintenance, and monitoring, is now open nationwide to partners, trainers, sponsors, and hopeful certificants. NGICP, founded in 2016 by the Water Environment Federation (WEF; Alexandria, Va.) and DC Water (Washington, D.C.), promotes a […]

China is midway through its decades-long South—North Water Transfer Project, a massive system of aqueducts intended to convey 44.8 billion m3 (11.8 trillion gal) of fresh water each year from China’s rural, rainy south to its drier and more urbanized north. However, the country also is exploring far-reaching ways to use stormwater as the basis […]

Designed to reduce combined sewer overflow, green infrastructure in the city of Philadelphia, Pa., in the U.S., has been proven effective based on monitoring data analyses, according to Dwayne Myers and Andrew Baldridge of CDM Smith and Chris Bergerson, Taylor Heffernan, Varsha Raj, Stephen White, and Elizabeth Mannarino of the Philadelphia Water Department. Many water […]