Scotland now has its first raingarden officer thanks to an innovative project from Central Scotland Green Network Trust and the Scottish Green Infrastructure Forum.

Europe’s largest greenspace initiative is hoping to follow successful projects in Melbourne, Philadelphia and Portland where raingardens have played an important role in dealing with surface water management, flood alleviation and greenspace creation. Funding has been secured from the Green Infrastructure Community Engagement Fund from SNH, the Peoples Postcode Lottery, Glasgow City Council and CSGNT.

Landscape architect, Rachel Howlett has taken up the new position and will be focusing on creating 10,000 raingardens for Scotland as part of the organisation’s focus on creating an environment that will support Central Scotland to thrive in a changing climate.

Rachel explained: “Scotland is known as a ‘wet country’ and raingardens can play an important role by using, storing or temporarily holding  rain water. This presents a fantastic opportunity to help reduce the impact of flooding whilst also contributing to improved biodiversity, pollution control and better greenspaces, and we have set the goal of creating 10,000 raingardens across l Scotland. ”

A Glasgow pilot project is now in place as the first phase of the national campaign to raise awareness and will focus on community and public engagement, developing raingarden plans and designs, and disseminating and promoting guidance on creating small scale raingardens.

The initiative will work with the Southside Housing Association and the community in Queensland Court and Gardens in North Cardonald, to produce bespoke, costed, raingarden designs. Queensland Gardens are two tower blocks owned by Southside Housing Association which are surrounded by short, regularly mown grassland, however there is currently no nature-based surface water management taking place.

Rachel, explained the plans for the area; commenting, she said: “Queensland Gardens presents an ideal opportunity to be innovative by creating multifunctional quality greenspaces which deal with pollution, water and biodiversity deficits. It is also important to use this initiative to provide play and education opportunities which can also contribute to a sense of mental wellbeing, pride and community empowerment.”

The 10,000 raingardens initiative is also focusing on raising awareness of the benefits of raingardens to encourage individuals, businesses and communities to create the systems in their gardens, community spaces and buildings.

For further information please visit http://www.sgif.org.uk/index.php/10-000-raingardens-for-scotland and tell us about any raingardens here.

As Europe’s largest greenspace initiative, CSGN is working to transform the central belt into a place where the environment adds value to the economy and where people’s lives are enriched by its quality.  Stretching from Ayrshire, Inverclyde and Dunbartonshire in the west, to Fife and Lothians in the east, it encompasses 19 local authorities across 10,000 sq km and has the potential to benefit 3.5 million people, equating to 70 per cent of Scotland’s population.

In this blog Vladimir Krivtsov from the University of Nottingham shares his very positive impressions of the 2018 SUDSnet conference, which he had the pleasure to attend at the end of August 2018. It took place at Coventry University, and was dedicated to the celebration of 15 years of SUDSnet’s existence.

SUDSnet is a UK-wide network for researchers, practitioners, agencies, developers and all those who are interested in Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS)

Both days of the conference started with very interesting key note talks, and there was plenty of time for networking over the refreshment breaks, as well as during the conference dinner.

There were talks and posters covering a range of topics, including; logistics of operating SuDS infrastructure in challenging environments; water quality and pollution control; multiple benefits of SuDS in relation to biodiversity and wildlife habitats; the choice of plants and planters for source control assets; hydrological monitoring of SuDS performance; permeable filters and filter media; Natural Flood Management and Rural SuDS; education and raising awareness of SuDS, and; stakeholder engagement (see the conference programme for further details). The geographical coverage was impressively widespread (e.g. Iraq, South Africa, EU), and there was even a special session devoted to the international case studies.

Retrofit SuDS

A number of presentations discussed issues related to SuDS retrofits. For example, the logistics of retrofitting SuDS were discussed in the talks related to international case studies, including the challenging conditions of refugee camps. At a more local level there were presentations dealing with installations of SuDS on Scottish farms and industrial estates. According to the current legislation, all new developments in Scotland must have SuDS. The developers appear to be aware of that, but often go for installation of a limited number of features (e.g. permeable pavements in industrial estates; permeable pavements and/or swales and basins in housing estates) largely ignoring other possibilities.

It was reported that the majority of industry representatives have difficulties with terminology. Furthermore, about 75% of companies do not know about the General Binding Rules regulating pollution prevention and SuDS installation. There is a lot of confusion with understanding SuDS purpose, benefits and technology. There are also issues with maintenance, hence considerable scope for improvement! Figures 1 and 2 suggest some examples of specific SuDS features suitable for retrofitting into public roads and industrial premises respectively. These examples are from a study conducted by the Heriot-Watt team at Houston Industrial Estate (West Lothian, Scotland), but the results are expected to be applicable elsewhere in Britain and further afield.

Figure 1. SuDS Retrofit options for roads at Houston Industrial Estate (West Lothian, Scotland).

Figure 2. SuDS Retrofit options for industrial premises at Houston Industrial Estate 

Summary

All in all, the conference turned out to be very relevant to the Urban Flood Resilence project. I think that SUDSnet appears to be a very vibrant and worthwhile network. Their conferences take place every 3 years, and I will certainly be trying my best to attend the next one (alas subject to funding). The presentations from the recent one are due to appear online (keep checking SUDSnet 2018 presentations) – all great stuff, cannot recommend it more. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I did!

Vladimir Krivtsov wrote this blog with contributions from the Heriot-Watt team (Scott Arthur and Brian D’Arcy). Read more about their work on the Urban Flood Resilience project in WP1. Resilience and WP2. Resource. This blog was coped from the original article on the University of Nottinghams website, after being highlighted by SUDSnet attendee, Rebecca Wade from Abertay University. 

Novembers blog features the Urban GreenUP project, an EU Horizon 2020 with the objective of developing, trialing and replicating "Renaturing Urban Plans" in a number of European and non-European partner cities with the aim to mitigate the effects of climate change, improve air quality and water management, as well as to increase the sustainability of our cities through innovative nature-based solutions. This month, the project launched the results of their analysis on obstacles hampering the implementation of Nature-Based Solutions and possible related countermeasures:

Making our cities more sustainable and less harmful for the environment is one of humanity’s top priorities. Different approaches in this direction can be adopted. So far, renaturing urban plans by making use of Nature-Based solutions (NBS) are among the most effective ones. However, different kinds of barriers may stand in their way or slow them down. To top it all off, these hindrances are often times interlinked to one another which therefore makes it impossible for radical changes such as NBS to take place. To address this issue, the EU-funded URBAN GreenUP project has prepared a document identifying the main classes of barriers faced by its fellow cities. It also provides indicators on how to overcome such barriers, along with a collection of success and failure stories.

The document outlines different kinds of barriers. Some of these obstacles are purely technical and related to the NBS design and installation while others are of political, legislative, financial and social concerns, which may jeopardize altogether the implementation of these NBS.

In the realm of politics, one of the toughest barriers is the conflict and mismatch of priorities between local and the national governments. These include budget restrictions and cuts, as well as bureaucratic red tapes like land ownership.

Further complications arise by adding legislation into the picture. For one, legislative approval is required every time important changes such as NBS implementation is to take place in a city. This will become more troublesome if we also account for NBS’s unconventional designs that may violate the local legislative measures or protocols, and if these interventions should be implemented on private property.

Looking at it from a financial perspective, the biggest concern that the population may have is where the funding needed to implement NBS should come from. As a matter of fact, NBS most often fail to offer tangible cash return in the short term. This makes it less attractive for future investors.

Last but not the least, social barriers may arise as NBS impose a change of scenery and habits for the locals. For one, people have low public awareness as to how environmental protection can be beneficial to them. As a consequence, nature based interventions are considered among the citizens’ lowest priorities thus giving them a weak stance as to whether they should be supported.

The document is publicly available on the URBAN GreenUP website and is meant to provide guidelines and recommendations to cities and organisations implementing NBS.