Implications for Future Risk Management Strategies - Climate Change and Infrastructure, Urban Systems, and Vulnerabilities - page 56

management. Plans include “Greener, Greater Communities,” increasing green spac-
es, improving the sustainability of waterways and wetlands, increasing the efficiency
of water supply systems and increasing water conservation, implementing a Greener
Buildings Plan, increasing the use of solar power, and developing a smarter and cleaner
electric utility grid, with a commitment to invest $1.5 billion in implement the Green
Infrastructure Plan.
3) OTHER CASES
Portland's multi-agency planning and budgeting processes offer one possible model in
which key goals are identified and then expressed in the budgets and priorities of each
agency. Tucson, which recently linked its land-use planning to water planning, offers
another example.
Milwaukee, for example, has spearheaded creation of a nonprofit trust that includes
multiple cities along shared watersheds to jointly plan and implement stormwater man-
agement strategies. A water agency in Portland that needed to meet water temperature
standards in obtaining a combination of 5 wastewater and stormwater permits clustered
these permits together and, rather than investing $60 million in refrigeration systems,
paid farmers to plant vegetation and trees along 37 miles of adjacent stream banks out-
side the city to meet its temperature requirements
Seatle has an extensive green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) program, which en-
ables flexible responses and strategies in response to such challenges as climate change.
Just South of Tucson, the Sonoita Valley Planning Partnership provides a multi-stake-
holder governing board to set goals and implement shared strategies across federal,
state trust, and nonprofit lands.
Some stormwater utilities have pegged their stormwater fees to amount of imperme-
able surface rather than to road frontage or square footage, as a beter relection of runof
into stormwater systems.
These cases and others suggest several lessons in moving toward more adaptable
infrastructures and urban systems:
• Potentials for green infrastructures, based on conceptions of infrastructure as a
dynamic, changing, focus of innovation, are often underestimated, at least where
current regulatory/engineering practice rules permit innovations
• Atention to standards, codes, certiication programs, and other administrative
structures that set rules for infrastructure design and construction can be a way
to reduce barriers and open up opportunities. Guidelines for building design
and building rehabilitation can be revisited to consider how projected climate
changes can be accommodated: e.g., sizing HVAC systems and culverts
• Risk-resilient infrastructures often involve thinking about optimization in new
ways. Being able to respond to changes in climate-related stresses and possible
climate-related surprises calls for increasing the value atributed to such charac-
teristics as flexibility and redundancy which in stable short-term optimization
modeling may be considered wasteful.
• Green infrastructures can often be pursued through partnerships between the
public sector, the private sector, and communities in ways that reduce their net