Parks have great potential for green stormwater infrastructure

Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) manages runoff naturally, reducing flooding and pollution while enhancing urban resilience, creating green spaces, spurring jobs, and improving public health.

By working with nature, green stormwater infrastructure in parks helps reduce flooding and its financial impacts while enhancing biodiversity and protecting ecosystems. It can improve public health outcomes by filtering air and water pollution, reducing urban heat, and creating new green spaces.

Since September 2023, City Parks Alliance has worked with a cohort of parks and stormwater agency leaders from nine cities across the country to inform how to increase collaboration between the parks and stormwater management sectors and address historic inequities. The project is in partnership with the US Water Alliance and the Green Infrastructure Leadership Exchange, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

• Parks and GSI Benefits
• Parks and GSI Report
• Parks and GSI Resources
• About the Initiative

There are many co-benefits from utilizing urban parks and green spaces for stormwater management with nature-based (or green) infrastructure. Guided by existing research and the experience of the practitioners in our cohort, the group identified seven significant co-benefits of GSI projects in urban parklands. They are:

1. Help protect increasingly vulnerable communities during large-scale weather events.
2. Save cities money by reducing the impacts of flooding.
3. Improve public health by protecting water quality and adding green space that keeps cities cooler and can be used for outdoor activities.
4. Advance environmental justice by benefiting historically underserved communities that lack adequate infrastructure and green space.
5. Provide a prime opportunity for workforce development to fill the gap in green infrastructure maintenance skills.
6. Transform how governmental agencies work together and serve their communities, and access new funding opportunities.
7. Build trust between community stakeholders and government (when its benefits are effectively implemented and communicated) and inspire more support for nature-based solutions at all levels.

The report:

• Identifies and addresses the systemic barriers to better collaboration between parks and stormwater management agencies and their partners,
• Shares recommendations and calls to action for public leaders and policy advocates to help overcome them, and
• Shares examples and resources to help cities tap into the public benefits and opportunities that GSI in parks can provide.

Support is provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.