Urban Water and Flood Risk Management: the Blue-Green Advantage - A China-UK-US Knowledge Exchange and Collaborative Opportunities Event

This workshop follows on from the highly successful collaboration between UK and US academics supported by the award of a Clean Water for All grant to the EPSRC Research Consortium on 'Delivering and Evaluating Multiple Flood-risk Benefits in Blue-Green Cities'. The event is hosted by the University of Nottingham and brings together scientists, engineers and planners from the City of Ningbo with leading academics from the UK, China and USA. The aim is to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and experience on the advantages of using integrated drainage systems, best practices and green infrastructure to provide sustainable urban water, flood risk and environmental management. The City of Ningbo is using new approaches to creating an ideal urban environment through, for example, creating a 3.3 km urban eco-corridor (http://www.asla.org/2013awards/253.html). The US team recently completed a comparative study of water and environmental governance in Portland Oregon and Vancouver, Washington (http://www.fsl.orst.edu/eco-p/ultra/), while the UK team represent the research consortium currently evaluating the multiple benefits of Blue-Green Cities (http://www.bluegreencities.ac.uk/bluegreencities/index.aspx).A Blue-Green City aims to recreate a naturally-oriented water cycle while contributing to the amenity of the city by bringing water management and green infrastructure together. This is achieved by combining and protecting the hydrological and ecological values of the urban landscape while providing resilient and adaptive measures to deal with flood events. The innovative Blue-Green approach to water management in the city aims to satisfy the demands of urban drainage and planning via coherent and integrated strategies, and places value on the connection and interaction between blue and green assets. During the Ningbo Workshop, the Chinese, British and American teams will exchange specialist technical knowledge and share ideas on urban hydrology, hydraulics, geomorphology, ecology, forestry and community perceptions to establish and evaluate the benefits using green infrastructure in conjunction with conventional piped drainage. However, Visionary Leadership and Community Engagement in Blue-Green Design are vital, and these will be central themes throughout the Event.

Who will benefit from this research?
The primary non-academic beneficiaries of the research dissemination and knowledge exchange events will be professional urban water and flood risk managers in the City of Ningbo. These people are potential 'users' of the research outputs, both immediately, and in the longer term. However, invitations will also be made to professional water engineers, hydrologists, landscape architects and urban planners from other nearby cities - broadening the pool of non-academic beneficiaries. Also, the P.I. will use the network developed during the Taihu Basin Flood Foresight Study (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~lgzwww/foresightchina/index.html) to reach out to Chinese flood risk management experts with the Taihu Basin Authority and national flood disaster management agencies in the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Water Resources in the People's Republic of China, who are based in Beijing. Hence, the scope of beneficiaries will expand to policy-makers, within national and regional agencies in China, who can also benefit from dissemination of the research and technical knowledge exchange.

How will they benefit from this research?
Flooding is the most serious environmental hazard in China and the risks associated with urban flooding are extreme. No where is immune: for example, the nation's capital was badly flooded in 2013 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/9421550/Major-flooding-in-Beijing-after-the-heaviest-rain-storm-in-60-years.html), causing deaths and widespread disruption to the city and embarrassment to the responsible authorities. Research performed under the Clean Water for All collaboration has the potential to contribute to sustainable urban flood risk management in China, generating improvements to the nation's health, wealth and culture through improving the effectiveness of urban flood risk management practices and policies. One of the key benefits of the Blue-Green approach to urban flood risk management lies in enhancing quality of life, health and creative output of city dwellers, not only during floods (when infrastructure turns blue), but also the rest of the time, when it is green. Use of green infrastructure is already expanding rapidly in China, where rapid new build allows for more vigorous uptake than in the UK or even the USA. In essence, the potential impacts are likely to be realised more quickly in China than anywhere else on the planet. It is not unrealistic to foresee changes in Ningbo within months of the dissemination event next summer.