Elsevier

Journal of Environmental Management

Volume 231, 1 February 2019, Pages 10-20
Journal of Environmental Management

Research article
Comprehensive performance evaluation of LID practices for the sponge city construction: A case study in Guangxi, China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.10.024Get rights and content

Highlights

  • An evaluation system is developed for quantifying the performance of LID practices.

  • LID practices provide respectable environmental, economic and social benefits.

  • Bio-retention facilities together with sunken green spaces show good performance.

  • The optimal scheme can reduce 75% annual runoff and offer socio-economic benefits.

  • The proposed evaluation system can inform the optimal selection of LID practices.

Abstract

Sponge city construction is a new concept of urban stormwater management, which can effectively relieve urban flooding, reduce non-point source pollution, and promote the usage of rainwater resources, often including the application of Low Impact Development (LID) techniques. Although 30 cities in China have been chosen to implement sponge city construction, there is a lack of a quantitative evaluation method to evaluate the environmental, economic, and social benefits of LID practices. This paper develops a comprehensive evaluation system to quantify the benefits of different combinations of LID units using the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The performance of five LID design scenarios with different locations and sizes of the bio-retention facility, the grassed swale, the sunken green space, the permeable pavement, and the storage tank were analyzed for a sports center project in Guangxi, China. Results indicated that the green scenario that contains 34.5% of bio-retention facilities and 46.0% of sunken green spaces had the best comprehensive performance regarding meeting the requirements of 75% annual total runoff reduction and the attainment of good operation performance, rainwater utilization, landscape promotion, and ecological service functions, mainly because they are micro-scale and decentralized facilities that can manage stormwater at the source through the natural process. The optimal scenario was adopted to construct the project, and the proposed evaluation system can also be applied to optimal selection and performance effect evaluation of LID practices in other sponge city projects.

Introduction

Large-scale urbanization in recent years has led to a rapid increase in impermeable surface areas. These areas have changed the natural hydrologic cycle (Jacobson, 2011; Zhang et al., 2014), and resulted in severe flooding, runoff pollution, water environment deterioration, and ecological damage (Paule-Mercado et al., 2017; Zhou, 2014). Traditional stormwater management methods are not capable of completely meeting the goals of sustainable urban development (Qin et al., 2013). On the other hand, sponge city construction is a new concept of urban stormwater management that provides a natural and low impact way to manage stormwater (Ahiablame et al., 2012; Kong et al., 2017).

The basic concept of a sponge city does not only refer to Low Impact Development (LID). It includes LID at the source, the stormwater drainage pipe system at the midway, and excessive stormwater drainage system at the terminal such as deep tunnel drainage systems and natural water bodies. The combination of LID techniques and systems could enhance the resilience of cities to cope with environmental risks from storm events of various recurrence periods (Casal-Campos et al., 2015; Xie et al., 2017). However, the principle of conventional stormwater drainage systems mainly focuses on “rapid-draining” of rainwater to downstream rather than retain and reuse it, which is contrary to the idea of constructing a city as a “resilient sponge” and thus is considered unsustainable (Barbosa et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2016; Qin et al., 2013). Instead, the LID techniques are considered ideal measures to improve the urban resilience, which manage stormwater at the source through the natural processes of infiltration, detention, storage, and purification (Dong et al., 2017; Hunt et al., 2010; Jia et al., 2017). Moreover, since the LID techniques usually are micro-scale and decentralized facilities, they are more feasible to be applied to highly urbanized areas in comparison with the upgrade of large-scale underground drainage systems (Gregoire and Clausen, 2011). Therefore, the concept and performance of sponge city construction can be notably embodied by LID practices.

In general, the aim of sponge city construction is to maintain as much as possible an unchanged regional hydrologic cycle in the process of rapid city-development. Also, sponge city construction takes into account the water resources, the water environment, the water security, the water economy, and the water cultural aspects (Zuo, 2016). This type of design that involves LID techniques can not only provide environmental benefits but also accelerate economic and social sustainable development (Demuzere et al., 2014). However, a majority of the existing studies mainly focus on the environmental benefits of LID practices, such as the control of runoff quantity and quality (Baek et al., 2015; Davis et al., 2012b; Liu et al., 2016). A limited number of studies have investigated the comprehensive benefits of LID facilities and optimization of LID combinations. For instance, Jia et al. (2015) attempted to simulate the efficiency of stormwater control using LID facilities with bio-retention, green roofs, grassed swales, rainwater storage tanks, and permeable pavements. They applied a decision support tool to evaluate the benefits of these LID facilities in view of water quality and quantity control and implementation cost (i.e., construction cost and maintenance cost) (Jia et al., 2015). Similarly, Chui et al. (2016) investigated the optimal LID scheme focusing on the lowest cost and the reduction of at least 20% of peak runoff. The LID facility unit cost to reduce peak runoff was calculated for Hong Kong and Seattle (Chui et al., 2016). In contrast, J. Li et al. (2017a) suggested a preferred order for each LID facility consisting of a bio-retention facility, a green roof, a storage tank, and a sunken green space. They then evaluated the performance of LID combinations consisting of two or three components (J. Li et al., 2017a).

Although the environmental benefits and implementation cost of LID facilities are essential factors when choosing an optimal LID scheme, the multiple benefits provided by these facilities, such as operation performance and social benefits (e.g., the landscape function and ecological service functions) (Pauleit et al., 2011), are equally important in decision making for sponge city construction (Visitacion et al., 2009). Additionally, existing evaluation systems do not consider a detailed optimization of sizes and locations of LID facilities, even though this is a priority in LID design schemes (Gilroy and McCuen, 2009).

This study proposes a comprehensive evaluation system, with an aim to quantify the performance of LID practices from the perspective of providing environmental, economic, and social benefits as well as provide references for optimization of types, locations, and sizes of LID facilities on the basis of scorings, comparisons, and the screening of various LID combination scenarios. The Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) is applied to obtain LID environmental indicator values, mainly because it is an open source software and has been widely applied to simulate water volumes, pollutant loads and LID practices, and is comparable to and compatible with its counterparts, e.g., InfoWorks and MIKE URBAN regarding one-dimensional modeling (Bosley II, 2008; Jacobson, 2011; Koudelak and West, 2008). In addition to the evaluation of the environmental benefits, the economic and social benefits are evaluated using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method which takes into account multiple indicators (Rahmati et al., 2016; Saaty, 2008). Finally, a LID scenario is developed that accomplishes the goals of a sponge city that not only mimics predevelopment hydrology but also provides significant economic and social benefits. Simultaneously, various size ranges of LID facilities are suggested for the design of LID schemes for use in different site conditions.

Section snippets

Study area

The proposed evaluation system was applied to the Guangxi Sports Center (Fig. 1), which is located in Nanning, China. Nanning is the capital city of the Guangxi Province and serves as a regional commercial and economic center and has a relatively high average annual rainfall volume of 1304.2 mm. Therefore, this site was selected as a pilot city for the implementation of sponge city construction with the primary aim to reduce at least 75% and 80% of the annual rainfall runoff for reconstruction

Indicator weights

The comprehensive benefit is composed of environmental, economic, and societal benefits, and the weights of their indicators and corresponding sub-indicators were calculated and are shown in Table 3. At each step in the hierarchy, the sum of the indicator weights should be one. The higher the value of the weight is, the more important the indicator is.

Considering the goals of sponge city construction (Ahiablame et al., 2013; Xie et al., 2017), the indicator of environmental benefit had the

Conclusions

The construction of a sponge city can contribute to the overall comprehensive benefits in the process of developing a sustainable city. A proposed comprehensive evaluation system was implemented in the study area that quantified the performance of various LID combination scenarios with respect to the environmental, economic, and social benefits. Results indicated that the green scenario (4) that contains 34.5% of bio-retention facilities and 46.0% of sunken green spaces had the best

Acknowledgments

This study was financially supported by National Water Grant “Major Science and Technology Program for Water Pollution Control and Treatment” (No. 2017ZX07202002) and the Shenzhen Science and Innovation Commission (JSGG20170412145935322 and JSGG20160428181710653). Special thanks to the Development and Reform Commission of Shenzhen Municipality (Urban Water Recycling and Environment Safety Program) and the Transport Commission of Shenzhen Municipality.

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