Assessing the benefits of green and blue infrastructure in peri-urban areas

• Autor(a) principal: Deyvid Wavel Barreto Rosa
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/63683; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9785-5141
• topic: Green and blue infrastructure; Land use and land cover changes; Urban expansion; Hydrologic modelling; Ecosystem services; Engenharia sanitária; Recursos hídricos - Desenvolvimento; Serviços ambientais; Infraestrutura urbana; Hidrologia urbana; Vargem das Flores, Reservatório de

Adopting Green and Blue Infrastructure (GBI) in urban planning can reduce and mitigate some hydrological, environmental, and social impacts of urbanisation. This thesis aims to explore and apply methods to quantify the benefits of GBI implementation to contribute to the public debate and decision-making for an urban development that is sustainable and water sensitive. A toolset was developed and applied to estimate the benefits of GBI implementation in a peri-urban catchment of Vargem das Flores reservoir, which is part of the drinking water supply system of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte. Considering the recent change in local land use and land cover (LULC) legislation, different LULC scenarios were prepared based on a georeferenced database obtained from municipal and state institutions. A LULC change model was employed to project the urban development in Vargem das Flores catchment up to 2040, and an alternative land use scenario was proposed, adopting the broad implementation of GBI techniques with an optimised cost-effectiveness relation. SWMM was then employed to assess potential hydrological and water quality impacts of the LULC scenarios, and the flooded area downstream of the reservoir was mapped with the joint application of SWMM and Hec-RAS. Results demonstrated GBI’s capacity to mitigate the impacts of impervious area increase, maintaining the hydrological processes and non-point pollution in similar conditions to the current ones, protecting the reservoir against the acceleration of its silting and eutrophication. Finally, a systematic literature review of 742 scientific articles published in journals of many research subjects mapped the methods applied to quantify GBI's social and environmental benefits in different geographical contexts, indicating possible fronts for future research and collaboration opportunities. The review calls for interdisciplinary studies and more exchanges among research areas to improve the adoption of GBI to address the increasing demand for multiple ecosystem services in the developing world. Methods and benefits usually employed in studies about urban green areas are suggested to be applied in the urban water management designed GBI.