Floods and consequential life cycle assessment: Integrating flood damage into the environmental assessment of stormwater Best Management Practices

Abstract

Stormwater management is essential to reducing the occurrence of flooding events in urban areas and to adapting to climate change. The construction of stormwater Best Management Practices (BMPs) entails a series of life cycle environmental impacts but also implies avoided burdens, such as replacing urban infrastructure after flooding. The aim of this paper is to integrate flood damage prevention into the life cycle assessment (LCA) of BMPs for quantifying their net environmental impact (NEI) and environmental payback (EP) from a consequential LCA standpoint. As a case study, the application of a filter, swale and infiltration trench (FST) in a Brazilian neighborhood was assessed considering a high-intensity rainfall event. The potential avoided impacts were related to cars and sidewalks that were not destroyed due to flooding. In terms of CO2eq. emissions, the environmental investment related to the FST was recovered when the destruction of one car or 84 m 2 of sidewalk was prevented. The NEI of the FSTs resulted in significant impact reductions (up to 700%) with respect to not accounting for the avoided products. This approach can be implemented to any type of BMP, and more accurate estimations can be made with data for different events and different types of material damage.

Flood mitigation performance of low impact development technologies under different storms for retrofitting an urbanized area

“…Traditional urban rainwater management practices are designed to meet performance standards (Pyke et al, 2011) and have exhibited the ineffectiveness in some extreme events such as the Tohoku tsunami in 2011 (Hu et al, 2017a). Meanwhile, some alternative approaches that control storm water at the source have become popular in the use of terms such as low impact development (USEPA, 2000;Xu et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2018) and best management practices (Ice, 2004;Fletcher et al, 2015;Petit-Boix et al, 2017).…”

A Multicriteria Planning Framework to Locate and Select Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) in Consolidated Urban Areas

“…On the other hand, the few studies that included SUDS selection did not consider larger spatial scales (i.e., city scale). For instance, Petit-Boix et al [37] developed a methodology that included life cycle analysis (LCA) for the selection of SUDS for an area of 0.42 km 2 in São Carlos (Brazil). In addition, Gogate et al [30] proposed a multicriteria analysis to select strategies of SUDS implementation in a watershed (11.71 km 2 ) in Pune.…”

Mitigation Life Cycle Assessment: Best Practices from LCA of Energy and Water Infrastructure That Incurs Impacts to Mitigate Harm

“…Articles were sought based on literature searches for LCA + wastewater, stormwater, CCS, and FGD, in addition to ad hoc inclusion of papers based on the authors' experience. Groups of recent papers from the stormwater literature by Anna Petit-Boix and collaborators [35][36][37][38][39][40] and by Sarah Brudler and collaborators [30,41,42] were particularly closely examined due to their relevance and display of deepening nuance about what we call mitigation LCA over time.…”