Why Do We Need Green Infrastructure in the Mystic River Watershed?
- gretchenklens
- Apr 30
- 13 min read
An essay by our Executive Director, Z Grabowski
No Time to Read? Key Takeaway: We need to create a watershed wide plan for green infrastructure. Green Infrastructure is a planning concept that seeks to find beneficial relationships between natural and engineered systems.
For too long we have designed infrastructure systems as something separate from our landscape and ecology, a design practice that reinforces a cultural worldview that humans are separate from nature. In practice, this has resulted in infrastructure systems imposed upon natural systems and allowed for the creation of many of the environmental issues that we are now addressing; climate change, habitat loss, water pollution, the collapse of our fisheries, etc… Green Infrastructure is a planning concept that treats infrastructure as part of ecological systems. In practice it delivers socially desirable services - like transportation, energy, water regulation - in ways that are symbiotic with ecological systems. How can we achieve this in the Mystic River watershed? Read more below.
What is “Green Infrastructure”
Green Infrastructure is a spatial planning approach that identifies and evaluates the costs and benefits of land use and infrastructure decisions and designs. Cities and regions that have adopted GI planning practices have realized significant economic, social, and environmental benefits, as evidenced by studies from the International City/County Management Association and the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Agency.
In the United States, many cities have used GI planning focused on Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) to comply with stormwater, sewer, and other clean water act regulation requirements much more cost-effectively than ‘grey’ infrastructure approaches alone. GSI is a distinct sub-system of a region’s green infrastructure. In order to be effective, GSI needs to be designed as part of a larger landscape planning strategy to provide coherence in how we meet human needs, care for the landscape that cares for us, and design our built environment. While this may sound complex, such an integrated approach is increasingly used across the United States and the world.
Why Green Infrastructure?
Across the world cities are successfully using GI to dramatically cut the costs of infrastructure services, increase business revenues in built up areas, improve human and ecological health, and mitigating extreme weather and other climate impacts. They do so by making built up areas more pleasant and beautiful places to be, while also providing critical, often underappreciated, social, ecological, and infrastructural functions.
Well designed GI systems can greatly increase recreational and active transit opportunities, mitigate extreme heat, reduce energy demand, improve air and water quality, increase drought resilience, and decrease flooding, among many other benefits. Here, we provide an overview of GI concepts and elements and identify paths forward to incorporate them into municipal and city planning and design in a transparent and equitable manner.
Green Infrastructure Concepts
As a planning approach, Green Infrastructure (GI) explicitly considers the relationships between built infrastructures and ecosystems - often designing them together as ecological-technological hybrids – to deliver diverse social, ecological, and technological functions and benefits.
The goal of GI planning is to create a cohesive and connected network of green spaces and elements as part of regional and municipal infrastructure systems.
Elements of GI include interconnected park systems, conserved lands, active transit corridors lined with trees and bioswales, rain gardens and grey water reuse systems, green roofs with integrated photo-voltaic panels, and green facades.
Like other infrastructure systems, the overall functions and benefits of GI depend on how well-connected different elements are. For example, reducing flooding and extreme heat across a city or town can require thousands of small interventions, like planting trees, creating living shorelines, installing rain gardens and bioswales, greening roofs and facades, restoring and daylighting streams and rivers, and creating new flood resilient parks, before we see significant decreases in temperature and flooding frequency. Similarly, active transportation networks that are safe, simple, and connected enough to be inviting for everyday use have been found to allow for almost 50% of commuter trips to be made by bicycle (the ‘Dutch Miracle’), which has significant economic benefits for cities, with an average 2.5x return on investment!
Integrating GI into city and municipal planning allows for unifying and streamlining the different planning needs of open space, transportation, flood and climate resilience, recreation, improving health in the built environment, and ensuring sustainable food production. Such an effort cuts across traditional planning siloes, and in order to be successful, must have inclusive community engagement from plan ideation to evaluation.
Status and Case for GI In Connecticut
In Connecticut, some cities, like New Haven, have made significant progress in implementing GSI, including numerous bioswales, to comply with Clean Water Act regulations. Others, like the City of Hartford have incorporated GSI into zoning policies, building on their successful experience with green roofs. Across the state, UConn CLEAR, municipal partners, and non-governmental organizations have implemented many rain gardens, and were the first in the nation to demonstrate the effectiveness of GSI at UConn’s main campus in Storrs for Total Maximum Daily Load (Clean Water Act) compliance.
The state has also seen some larger multi-functional GI projects, like Meriden’s partial daylighting of Harbor Brook to create the Meriden Green, a park and flood control area that forms a key piece of their downtown revitalization strategy.
Adopting strategic GI planning approaches in CT (which include but are not limited to GSI) has lagged behind peer states like Massachusetts in terms of open space and recreation planning and especially in the so-called Pioneer Valley. The State of Maryland has pioneered GI approaches, and like Connecticut’s Long Island Sound, Maryland has seen significant federal expenditures to improve the health of Chesapeake Bay and provides a potential roadmap for cohesively addressing water quality issues while improving regional and local quality of life and meeting the state’s environmental quality objectives. Crucially, these types of regional plans and approaches can greatly ease a municipalities access to a variety of funding sources for transportation, trails, storm and sewer, and other capital improvement projects, which make them more attractive for residents and investors alike.
What follows are best practices in aligning GI approaches with municipal planning needs and some ideas on how we can make this happen in our watershed. We hope this makes clear the Alliance’s agenda of using our Watershed Regeneration Action Plan to assist our partner municipalities and organizations in securing diverse streams of funding for infrastructure interventions and other projects that benefit human and watershed health and vitality.
How Can Cities and Regions Implement Green Infrastructure?
GI as a cross department approach requiring meaningful community engagement
Planning for GI requires reconfiguring our ways of thinking about relationships between land use and infrastructure systems. This type of planning across existing priority areas and ‘lanes’ of state agencies, municipal departments, and non-governmental organizations may seem to increase the complexity of planning at first, especially in the face of a changing climate and but is geared towards reducing the planning burden on each unit, and seeks to identify synergies between different department priorities as well as more unified approaches to infrastructure life cycle management and maintenance - such as aligning maintenance schedules.
Identifying synergies is a key area of focus of our ongoing Planners’ convenings, and we hope to continue to evolve this group to serve as more of an inter-agency committee that would guide the priorities of our WRAP and identify cross cutting solutions to challenges that result from land relations and infrastructure design. This type of early collaboration and cross agency working groups are critical for effective GI planning.
It is also well recognized that early community engagement dramatically reduces planning time, as impacted community members and entities can voice their needs, desires, and concerns, before planning is well underway, which has ben a major focus of our design circles as well as community conversations.
The first step in a successful GI program is therefore creating a strong coalition of departments responsible for different infrastructure systems, regional planning and conservation organizations, and other community based organizations. On the infrastructure agency side, this requires strong collaboration from the entities responsible for storm and sewer management, streetscape design and maintenance, building and zoning codes, parks and recreation, and active transportation. With this coalition in place, the team should develop mechanisms to develop trust and relationships, in order to focus on the focal areas most relevant to your particular community.
Focal Areas for GI planning
While GI is a cross cutting planning concept, we must also make clear how specific needs and challenges are addressed by a comprehensive GI planning effort.
Flood Risk, Water Quality, and Aquatic Habitat Integrity
Floods are increasing in Connecticut, and in the Mystic River Watershed, especially due to increasing extreme precipitation events and higher coastal storm surges combined with rising sea level. Coastal flooding requires its own set of GI solutions, namely allowing for coastal marsh migration, restoring sand dunes and coastal vegetation, which also have water quality benefits. Much can be done to make more space for inland waters to reduce the impacts of flooding on properties, infrastructure, and people, and a GI approach to flood reduction can also provide significant benefits to water quality and aquatic habitat integrity. A primary challenge to GI approaches to reducing flooding, which rely on upland strategies for slowing, retaining, infiltrating, and evaporating water combined with increasing the downstream room for floodwaters, is much of the flood control policy in CT has relied on a command and control approach of building large flood infrastructure such as dams, dikes, and levees, and channelizing rivers and streams, disconnecting them from their floodplains. In urban areas, such as Hartford, CT, rivers have also been completely buried, although buildings that are on top of them face increasing flood risks.
As the Meriden Green example shows, what was once engineered, can be re-engineered, although it certainly requires a robust consideration of the long term costs and benefits of addressing repeat increasing flood risk. Such projects, while intensive (see below), are often the only way to restore the flood holding capacity of highly urbanized areas. By restoring channelized streams and rivers and their riparian areas by reconnecting them with their floodplains and wetland complexes, we can increase their capacity to absorb and store flood waters, along with their ability to retain and utilize nutrients to nurture vegetation, insects, fish, and other wildlife, which will have significant benefits for our inland and coastal fisheries.
Active Transportation, Trails, and Greenspace Access
CT continues to make historic investments in its trail systems, and multi-use path use continues to increase year after year. And yet, compared to peer states, countries, and similar sized cities, we lag considerably in active transportation (walking, cycling), and continue to drive more and more every year. One reason active transportation, and in particular cycling, struggles, is that non-car road users often experience using the road as unsafe and inconvenient. The increasing number of multi-use trail users tells us that if pedestrians and cyclists have paths that are safe, convenient, comfortable, and accessible, they will use them, findings supported by a large body of active transportation research. Without city wide networks of fully separated bike lanes, urban cycling will likely continue to stagnate in the state, as it has even in some of the most cycling friendly cities in the United States as compared to European peers. For example, Portland, OR has attempted a city wide bicycle network, and yet most bike lanes in the city are not separated and cycle use still represents a small fraction of total trips, a situation mirrored by New York City and many other municipalities. In Europe, similar differences can be observed, where in London increases in fully separated bike lanes led to significant increases in bicycle trips (an almost 100% increase, but still between 3.5 and 4.5% in recent years), although the city still lags behind Copenhagen - where almost 50% of commuters use bicycles due to large investments in simple, safe, and connected bicycle infrastructure - yielding an over 2.5x economic return on municipal dollars invested in bicycle infrastructure! Sadly, without good design, pedestrians and cyclists are often pitted against each other – and it seems encouraging both modes of active transit will require making dedicated space for different kinds of users.
Evaluating the walkability and bikeability of cities, also lends insight into their overall livability – which connects to the accessibility of their green space, which for cities in CT and the USA, is often highly uneven upon lines of race and class. Another key factor in promoting active transit is that multi-use paths and active transit networks need to connect residences to destinations – e.g. places of employment, areas to recreate, and places for entertainment and commerce like business districts. By integrating safe, simple, and connected single and multi use paths, into larger networks of greenspaces we can provide greater access to healthy active and passive recreation (and traditional subsistence!) opportunities. By making region wide networks we can connect to the other goals of making regions more livable and economically competitive. By connecting active transit networks with restored streams and rivers, and by integrating green stormwater infrastructure and trees to separate bikes from cars and pedestrians, we can also manage stormwater, flooding, and extreme heat.
Urban Heat, Livability, and Economic Development
Climate change coupled with increasing urban density, loss of urban tree canopy, is exacerbating extreme heat in urban areas across the state, including our built up areas of downtown mystic, old mystic, prompting large investments in the state’s urban tree canopy. In addition to the acute impacts of urban heat, the urban heat island has chronic impacts on resident and visitor health and finances by increasing energy burdens for cooling, worsening air pollution, and making urban areas less pleasant places to live and visit. Cities that have taken pro-active strategies to mitigate the urban heat island increase business revenues in revitalized districts, along with increased property values, renter stability, and lowered energy bills and usage. Additionally, by making urban areas cooler and more comfortable for pedestrians and cyclists, we can decrease urban vehicle miles traveled, further reducing heat, air and water pollution, and green-house gas emissions.
GI strategies for heat mitigation often focus on increasing urban canopy – particularly to provide shade, and if trees have sufficient water available, dramatically reducing temperatures through the evapo-transpirative cooling effect of trees ‘breathing’ out moisture. One mid-sized tree can provide an ambient cooling effect equivalent to 10 air conditioning units. By providing continuous shade in bicycle boulevards, parks, and restored stream networks, the urban forest can effectively cancel out the impacts of climate change in many temperate zone cities. Additional cooling strategies include using green roofs instead of asphalt roofs, especially those with sufficient soil depth to store water and provide a similar evapotranspirative cooling effect, as well as green facades – i.e. green walls from either vertical planters, or vine or espaliered fruit tree covered trellises common in traditional architecture, which likewise reduce heat absorption and reflection of buildings. Including water features such as streams, splash parks, and fountains, especially in dedicated outdoor cooling centers, can provide additional relief for urban residents in times of extreme heat.
Open Space, Biodiversity Conservation, Food System and Building Material Sustainability
All of the above focal areas call for reconfiguring how we plan for integrating specific infrastructure systems to reach our goals of increasing active transportation, improving access to green space, improving the livability, energy efficiency, and climate resilience of cities. They also depend upon the overall ways in which we use and relate to landscapes and land uses. We must also consider the broader landscape impacts of particular land uses on our environmental goals of conserving open space and protecting biodiversity while creating sustainable food and material systems.
GI planning includes an explicit consideration of agricultural land uses – and asks us to consider the ecological impacts, as well as the interdependencies of different types of production systems. In this sense, we must focus on regenerative agricultural systems – those which improve water quality, store carbon in the soil, and improve biodiversity, and can include food forests such as the Indigenous nut and fruit forests of the Northeast as is being done in Boston, MA. Overall these agro-ecological systems have also historically provided much of the raw material for our built environment, including timber for homes, straw and hemp for insulation, and clay and sand for bricks and concrete. Embracing carbon drawdown construction, or building buildings from materials which store carbon that come from the regenerative agroecological practices that further store carbon in the soil, can significantly reduce green house gas emissions, as well as creating regenerative building systems which likewise purify water on site, and do not expose inhabitants or workers to toxic chemicals from building materials.
Implementing Municipal Green Infrastructure – Avenues for Action!
A key strategy for implementing municipal green infrastructure is by incorporating GI concepts and projects into a town’s legislatively required Plan of Conservation and Development. Using an overall concept of function through connectivity and the focal areas above, GI can address key challenges facing many CT communities. With such a vision in place, communities will have to undertake additional work to understand and analyze the costs and benefits of different strategies and projects, while keeping in mind that the ultimate benefits of GI will become realized by creating cohesive networks at appropriate scales. GI also addresses other emergent planning needs beyond the POCD, including resilience planning and strategic economic development planning. Ultimately, GI, like any other infrastructure system, needs to be implemented in a town or cities Capital Improvement Planning Process (CIP). In this sense, a POCD provides a publicly engaged vision, and the strategic CIP process identifies the costs of implementing POCD projects, benefits to town finances, funding sources, and necessary budget and personnel. Ultimately Town Councils or Boards of Selectpeople, approve the budget for a CIP, which also often has input from an economic development agency, a town’s planning and public works departments, and other relevant stakeholders. To be truly effective, a POCD should have an implementation committee tasked with providing updates on progress, as well as finding internal and external funding for improvements. Outside of municipal POCD processes, Watershed Based Plans, like our Watershed Regeneration Action Plan, are key ways of implementing watershed wide Green Infrastructure and Green Stormwater Infrastructure, especially as they can serve as vehicles to direct diverse funding sources for watershed regeneration projects. Both POCDs and Watershed Based Plans rely on dedicated funding mechanisms to implement specific projects.
Examples of internal funding mechanisms for GI include a towns general budget for public works, the creation of stormwater utilities, quality of life bonds, and numerous state, federal, and private grant sources, including funding for trails in CT, open space acquisition, EPA 319 funding, and State Revolving Funds (SRF). The adoption of a high quality POCD or Watershed plan identifies these funding sources early on and is often required for many sources of state discretionary funding. GI systems are also composed of many private lands. Outreach and education on the benefits of managing private lands for the many ecosystem services it provides are also part of a holistic GI strategy.
Ultimately, the benefits of GI are directly tied into who participates in planning, designing, implementing, maintaining, and having access to different forms of GI, and as municipalities around the world and US are proving, well designed and maintained GI systems, like other infrastructure systems, are vital parts of a livable future.
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