New Haven’s Green Infrastructure program has won Harvard’s School of Government 2018 Roy Family Award for Environmental Partnership!

This award is presented every two years to celebrate an outstanding public-private partnership project that enhances environmental quality through novel and creative approaches. This project won against over 40 other partnerships nationwide.

Led by the City of San Francisco and Lotus Water, the Exchange has completed two important guides for green infrastructure practitioners. A recording of a recent webinar about the guides is available here, and the powerpoint slides are located here.

Evaluation and Recommendations for Green Infrastructure Modeling Standards (June 2018) recommends default GSI parameters for modeling bio-retention with the SWMM engine and evaluates model-predicted GSI performance in various regions of the country. Recommended Monitoring Practices for Green Infrastructure (June 2018) includes an evaluation of existing monitoring methods, equipment, and deployment strategies for ease of implementation, cost-effectiveness, applicability, and performance. This guide also compares monitoring data to the model‐predicted bio-retention performance from the first document to evaluate how accurately GSI modeling reflects actual measured performance. This project was funded through the Exchange Collaboration Grant. Collaborating members include New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, King County, DC Department of Energy & the Environment, and Vancouver.

The new guide is a great resource for water utilities and water departments seeking to expand the public health benefits of their green infrastructure projects and to better connect with the public health sector in their communities. After all, everyone in the water sector is a provider of public health! Produced by Willamette Partnership and Oregon Public Health Insitute, this guide is an outgrowth of the Exchange-sponsored GSI & Public Health Convening that took place in the spring of 2018 and that was spearheaded by Irene Ogata from the City of Tucson.

A webinar about the guide was held on July 27, 2018, at 12-1:30 ET. Enclosed is a link to a recording and the slides from the webinar. Please note that the recording link may ask you to register for the webinar before connecting you to the recording.

Also as part of this effort, the Willamette Partnership helped Exchange members identify opportunities to improve public health and community livability through their infrastructure investments.  Snapshots of those opportunities can be found in in the following reports:

Seattle Health & Green Infrastructure Opportunities Analysis (full report)
Seattle Health & Green Infrastructure Opportunities Analysis (2-pager)
Portland Health & Green Infrastructure Opportunities Assessment (2-pager)
Los Angeles Health & Green Infrastructure Opportunities Assessment (2-pager)
Tucson Health & Green Infrastructure Opportunities Assessment (2-pager)
Vancouver Health & Green Infrastructure Opportunities Assessment (2-pager)