Journal: Blue-Green Systems

Abbreviation

Publisher

IWA Publishing

Journal Volumes

ISSN

2617-4782

Description

Filters

2020 - 20253
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Publications 1 - 3 of 3
  • Designing pluvial flood-safe urban landscapes using differentiable surrogate flood models
    Item type: Journal Article
    Guo, Zifeng; Leitão, João P. (2025)
    Blue-Green Systems
    Integrating pluvial flood-risk management into the early stages of urban planning and design has become a mandatory task for urban planners due to the increasing flood risks caused by climate change. This can be done by optimizing urban layout designs using flood simulations. However, such simulation-driven optimization cannot be easily conducted due to (i) the long computational time for physically-based models to simulate and (ii) the inability to obtain design feedback information without trial and error. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a gradient descent formulation for pluvial flood-driven urban design by combining flood surrogate models and design objective functions. The proposed method was tested on urban patch data using one-step and iterative gradient-descent processes, showing promising results. The one-step method trained on the original dataset achieved the lowest intersection over union (IoU) ratio of the high-hazard-rating areas between the original inputs and final results, with the median IoU reaching below 0.1. In contrast, the iterative method trained on the expanded dataset achieved the highest IoU value, with the median reaching approximately 0.25. The proposed model in this study is an original contribution that links the areas of flood simulation and urban design in order to create pluvial flood-safe urban layouts.
  • Multi-scale stormwater harvesting to enhance urban resilience to climate change impacts and natural disasters
    Item type: Journal Article
    Nguyen, Thuy Thi; Bach, Peter M.; Pahlow, Markus (2022)
    Blue-Green Systems
    Stormwater harvesting systems are a viable option to adapt cities to cope with climate change and reduce pressure on water supply services. This is particularly crucial in the event of natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes, floods), where large parts of cities may become disconnected from a secure water supply for prolonged time periods. We demonstrate how optimum location, density and storage size can be determined using UrbanBEATS, a spatial planning-support system for planning and design of sustainable Blue-Green Infrastructure strategies. We investigate the Otakaro/Avon River catchment, Christchurch, New Zealand for the time periods 2011-2020, 2041-2050 and 2091-2100 (for the RCP 8.5 climate change scenario). For targets of 30% of potable water substitution and 70% storage volumetric reliability, we found that stormwater harvesting systems in all climate scenarios required a larger capacity compared to the baseline. Most storages achieved their set targets and were larger than the municipality's recommended 9 m(3) for flood inundation, indicating that the identified storages would also reduce minor flooding while ensuring water savings. A shift in the spatial layout of modelled systems from highly distributed to more centralised, however, raises a potential conflict with disaster resilience where more local solutions would be preferable.
  • The multi-faceted nature of Blue-Green Systems coming to light
    Item type: Other Journal Item
    Deletic, Ana; Qu, Jiuhui; Bach, Peter Marcus; et al. (2020)
    Blue-Green Systems
Publications 1 - 3 of 3