Low Impact Development practices in the context of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: A new concept, lessons learned and challenges

Abstract

The increase in urbanization and climate change brings new challenges to the cities' sustainability and resilience, mainly related to flood and drought events. Among these challenges, it can be highlighted the physical and health damage to the population, interruption of water, energy and food supply services, damage to basic infrastructure, economic losses and contamination of urban rivers. To contribute to the increase of resilience in urban centers, LID practices have been used as a new approach of mitigation and adaptation within urban drainage systems, aiming at runoff retention, peak flow attenuation, pollutant removal and ecosystem services restoration (e.g.: resources recycling, carbon sequestration, thermal comfort and landscape integration). These different mitigation purposes and complementary benefits provided by LID practices can be related to the different Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) presented by the United Nations (UN), to achieve countries' systemic sustainability. The identification of local techniques that contribute to the different SDG helps to achieve their territorialization and application as public policy. Therefore, this paper presents a literature review, categorizing the studies into different generations based on their main application purpose and presents a linkage of the LID benefits to different SDG. Some challenges were identified requiring further investigation, such as the need to identify and quantify the energy demands for LID practices maintenance and their incorporation in the system final energy balance, identification of processes that contribute to carbon sequestration and emission, and risks of emerging pollutants for human health from water reuse and nutrient cycling for sustainable agriculture.

Pollutant accumulation and microbial community evolution in rain gardens with different drainage types at field scale

“…LID technology can purify and recycle stormwater runoff as a resource. LID technology carries out land planning and site design by integrating with nature, and constructs stormwater treatment facilities with drainage function (high-efficiency infiltration performance) and natural landscape features 4 . Rain gardens, which can directly be built in any unpaved space and planted with native plants, have strong runoff treatment capabilities, groundwater recharge capabilities, and landscaping capabilities 5 .…”

Flooding and Overflow Mitigation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning Based on Koopman Operator of Urban Drainage Systems

“…Flooding and combined sewer overflow (CSO) are inevitable problems of many urban drainage systems (UDSs) around the world (Liao et al., 2019; Ochoa et al., 2019; Qi et al., 2021; Xie et al., 2017; Zhi et al., 2020). Traditional solutions to these problems provide improvement in the capacity of the drainage infrastructure by expanding pipes and building detention basins/low‐impact development (Batalini de Macedo et al., 2021; Chan et al., 2018; Yazdi, 2018). However, these solutions are infeasible in many areas due to high costs and lack of underground space (Lund et al., 2018).…”

Multi-criteria Decision-making Approach for Characterizing the Best Low Impact Development (LID) Techniques for Stormwater Management

“…Urban infrastructure management needs to be integrated, beginning with a definition of land-use that aims to preserve natural functions such as infiltration and the natural drainage system [1][2][3]. This approach to development has been termed Low Impact Development (LID) in the United States or Water-Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) in Australia [4].…”