Chapter 1: Naturally Stronger
Chapter 1 provides an overview of Naturally Stronger, which illustrates the importance of equitable investments in natural water infrastructure by highlighting successes across the country including contributions to national and local economies.
We hear it often: the U.S. has an infrastructure problem. And while crumbling roads and failing bridges are the images most commonly invoked, the state of another huge component — the nation’s water infrastructure — is equally troubling. Sewage overflows, localized flooding, polluted runoff, leaky pipes and at-risk water supplies plague our communities. Water infrastructure across our country is outdated.
The American Water Works Association conservatively estimates it will cost $1 trillion over the next quarter century to upgrade our drinking water systems alone. Additionally, the American Society of Civil Engineers determined that over $271 billion in investment is needed for current and future demands for wastewater infrastructure.
Furthermore, low-wealth neighborhoods and communities of color, which already suffer from a lack of investment and opportunity, are impacted the most. There is an urgent need for equitable investments in water infrastructure in both urban and rural communities across the country. These communities disproportionately experience the effects of urban flooding, combined sewer overflows and the health burdens of poor water quality. Low-wealth communities also tend to have fewer trees and green space, which help mitigate flooding and stormwater impacts.
To address these problems, we do not just need more investment in water infrastructure, we need a new kind of water infrastructure and management and we need it in the communities that have historically been left out of water infrastructure investments. Tackling America’s water infrastructure needs presents us with a unique opportunity to grow the economy and foster positive transformation in our communities. The solution is equitable investment in and implementation of natural infrastructure.
While investments in traditional “gray” infrastructure will be essential moving forward, natural infrastructure will be a critical complement that will go a long way to protecting our drinking water and reducing sewer overflows, polluted stormwater, and community flooding. Natural infrastructure refers to a variety of practices that protect, restore, or mimic natural water systems. Examples include restoring or increasing urban trees to soak up and clean polluted stormwater and prevent flooding, or protecting source water streams that provide drinking water to our communities. These more resilient natural solutions efficiently safeguard and manage water in ways that improve quality of life — all at lower cost than traditional “gray” infrastructure.
Traditional, or gray, water infrastructure that depends on pipes and treatment facilities to move stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water from one place to another can be improved upon with less cost by investing in natural infrastructure. By protecting or mimicking natural water systems, we eliminate some of the strain on traditional infrastructure. For example, wetlands located in areas upstream of communities naturally absorb and hold floodwater; rain gardens in urban areas provide a similar function. These systems, which are cheaper to build than concrete pipes or holding ponds, retain and infiltrate water into the soil and take the burden off the existing piped water system.
If natural infrastructure is used in an integrated water system, we can transform and restore our environment, invigorate the economy, and confront some of our country’s most persistent inequities.
This “integrated” approach is achieved by bringing together different city agencies, nonprofits, and other diverse stakeholders that work on water together on collective problem-solving and decision-making that benefits the diverse members of the community.
A Weakened System
America’s water system is not monolithic. Some cities get their drinking water from carefully stewarded rivers and lakes, while others rely on complex filtration systems or private wells. Our wastewater management systems are equally diverse with varying levels and types of treatment ranging from treatment plants to treatment wetlands.
Stormwater management systems are likewise varied with some systems connecting directly to streams while other systems combine with waste water pipes that connect to treatment plants. Yet across the country these systems — our nation’s water infrastructure — are failing and aging out. Growing populations that are increasingly spread out, new technology requirements of a rapidly changing economy, and several decades of underinvestment have combined to create a sizable backlog of water infrastructure projects all over the country.
Natural systems make up a critical component of our nation’s water infrastructure, supporting and enhancing our traditional water infrastructure by providing water flow regulation, flood control, water purification, and water temperature regulation. Unfortunately, these systems are being lost to unsustainable development and poor management, which causes fragmentation and degradation. The continued loss of these forests, floodplains, and wetlands that provide essential services to water utilities, businesses, and communities serves to compound our water infrastructure challenges.
Long-term forecasts suggest our water systems will be further strained by changing weather and climate and there is a great need for adaptation to accommodate these changes. Storm frequencies, intensities, and duration are shifting, and in many regions, more severe storms are expected to occur more often. Storm sewer and flood control systems will be asked to handle these surges, forcing developers and municipalities to adopt new strategies. Elsewhere, drought leaves communities unable to provide adequate drinking water for residents. How do we face a future with too much water, too little water, and water at the wrong time?
New Solutions to Strengthen Communities
Many cities, towns, and neighborhoods are recognizing the interconnections between water infrastructure, quality of life, and economic development. They are using nature as infrastructure — either by protecting it or mimicking it — to efficiently safeguard and manage water in a way that improves lives at lower costs than traditional “gray” pipe infrastructure.
The cities and towns that have started using natural infrastructure are doing so for good reason. A report by the Environmental Finance Center at the University of Maryland found natural infrastructure increases local jobs, since these practices rely on local workers for installation and continued maintenance.
Moreover, the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics summary, Green Goods and Services 2013, found that the green jobs sector, of which natural infrastructure is a part, was responsible for 3.4 million jobs.
According to the Brookings Institute, green job growth outpaced traditional job growth at a rate of nearly 2-to-1 in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan centers from 2008 to 2010, providing diverse, career-starting opportunities in growth industries for communities that need them most. As the number and scope of natural infrastructure initiatives increase, opportunities for developing more jobs will increase as well.
By deploying natural solutions to water infrastructure challenges, communities across the country are saving money, revitalizing local economies, and improving water quality while delivering a host of other benefits to their communities — from parks and open space to new employment opportunities. These nature-based strategies are replicable and viable, across the geographic spectrum, in metropolitan and rural areas alike.
Putting Equity at the Center of Infrastructure Investment
Equitable water infrastructure is an approach designed to ensure that the voices of underserved communities are heard and their challenges and needs identified, then adequately addressed in a manner that engages the community and improves quality of life.
Equitable water infrastructure approaches include:
· Targeting resources for systems improvements to communities with the most compromised water and waste water service through approaches such as set-asides and priority scoring
· Engaging firms and workers from disadvantaged communities to design, build, operate, and maintain the water infrastructure systems
· Ensuring community voices and authority in planning, prioritizing, and implementing new infrastructure investments
· Improving health and quality of life outcomes for communities with compromised water systems
Recognizing and replicating this new approach can have wide-ranging benefits throughout the U.S. It can play a pivotal role in building a sustainable economy, engaging disadvantaged communities in the skills and business growth of this emerging sector, and it can create healthier environments for the communities that have faced the greatest environmental and health vulnerabilities. To achieve maximum impact, the investments must take into account — and seek to correct for — longstanding inequities in the water services a community receives. These inequities are evident in some of the nation’s recent environmental disasters: the exposure by Flint residents to lead-poisoned water; the thousands of water shutoffs in Baltimore and Detroit neighborhoods; the still unrecovered African American neighborhoods of New Orleans inundated by the levee breeches after Hurricane Katrina; and the intentionally exclusionary municipal boundaries that have left rural residents from California to Texas in unincorporated communities without clean water or sewer access.
We need transparency and accountability for infrastructure decision-making. We must ask ourselves: Who benefits, who pays, and who decides where resources are allocated? How do we ensure that low-wealth communities and communities of color are assured the same protections, services, and opportunities as everyone else?
Equitable approaches have delivered environmental justice remediation in the Bay View Hunters Point neighborhood surrounding the San Francisco PUC’s water treatment plant; have given contracts to the Portland, Oregon-based social enterprise Verde, to build swales and stormwater protection in vulnerable immigrant and Native American neighborhoods; and have dedicated millions to natural stormwater treatment in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans. Moreover, calls for water equity continue from Flint, Michigan, to remediate the lead and ensure safe drinking water for the future.
As with any other type of infrastructure, we must make water infrastructure an equity issue.
This is more than a moral imperative; it is an economic one. Ample research confirms that widening inequality slows economic growth. Meanwhile, systematically neglected racial and ethnic groups are growing in population. By 2042, the majority of those living in America will be people of color, according to PolicyLink’s 2011 report, America’s Tomorrow. Matching support with where it is most needed, allowing those who have been left behind to participate, contribute, and benefit, will increasingly benefit the economy overall.
A New Infrastructure Paradigm: Gray, Green, and In Between
Perhaps the image of water infrastructure that springs most readily to mind is the drain pipe: a conduit to take wastewater away quickly and invisibly. Traditionally we have taken a similar approach to stormwater and urban drainage: endless miles of buried pipes, sewers, and tunnels that carry the water off for treatment or discharge.
Most people are happy with this “out of sight, out of mind” arrangement — until, of course, a toilet backs up, a basement floods, or the local lake becomes clogged with toxic algae. While effective for the time period when much of it was built, these “gray” infrastructure approaches are expensive, and provide only limited benefits to the communities they serve.
Concrete and steel infrastructure will always play a critical role in water conveyance and treatment, but the smart path forward for any community seeking to maximize effectiveness and minimize cost is to integrate it with natural infrastructure.
The portfolio of natural infrastructure practices includes a variety of engineered systems that are proven tools to reduce or prevent flows of runoff into over-stressed sewer systems and waters, while providing tangible benefits to neighborhoods and communities. These systems, referred to as Natural Stormwater Infrastructure, can include using rooftop vegetation to control stormwater and reduce energy use, constructing wetlands to retain floodwater, installing permeable pavement to mimic natural hydrology, and using or reusing water more efficiently on site. Communities that have incorporated natural stormwater infrastructure into their water management regimes have reduced energy costs, diminished the impacts of flooding, and improved public health.
Access to clean water and the green spaces provided by natural infrastructure correlate with improved air quality, healthier lifestyles, and lower medical bills, according to Banking on Green, the 2012 American Rivers, American Society of Landscape Architects, ECONorthwest, and Water Environment Federation report. Natural infrastructure practices typically utilize plants to cover or replace concrete, reducing or eliminating heat islands and improving air quality. Additionally, many of these systems provide green space for recreation or community amenity.
Learn more about equitable investment in natural infrastructure:
· Chapter 1: Naturally Stronger
· Chapter 2: Our Communities At Risk
· Chapter 3: A New Approach to Natural Infrastructure
· Chapter 4: Natural Infrastructure: An Economic Engine
· Chapter 5: Community Benefits of Integrated Infrastructure
· Chapter 6: Funding Natural Infrastructure
