scholarly journals Interdisciplinary Collaboration on Green Infrastructure for Urban Watershed Management: An Ohio Case Study

Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 738 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shifflett ◽  
Newcomer-Johnson ◽  
Yess ◽  
Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Workforce Development ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Water Infrastructure ◽  
Creek Watershed

Many older Midwestern cities of the United States are challenged by costly aging water infrastructure while working to revitalize urban areas. These cities developed much of their water infrastructure before the Clean Water Act became law and have struggled to mitigate contaminant loading to surface waters. An increasingly common approach to resolving these challenges is the integration of green infrastructure with gray infrastructure improvements to manage point and non-point source pollution. Stakeholder engagement and collaboration during green infrastructure planning can help address impairments and promote community involvement through the revitalization process. Mill Creek watershed in Cincinnati, OH, USA has seen improvement in watershed integrity indicators after being impaired for many decades by flashy hydrology, combined sewer overflows, and water quality degradation. A workshop was conducted to examine how integrated green and gray infrastructure has contributed to improvements in Mill Creek over the past several decades. This effort sought to examine internal and external factors that influence a multi-stakeholder watershed approach to planning, implementing, and evaluating green infrastructure techniques. Community investment and physical infrastructure, access to datasets, and skills and knowledge exchange were essential in improving use attainment in the Mill Creek. Strategic placement of green infrastructure has the potential to maximize water quality benefits and ecosystem services. However, green infrastructure deployment has been more opportunistic due to the diversity of stakeholder and decision maker interests. Future work should consider collaborative approaches to address scaling challenges and workforce development to maximize green infrastructure benefits.

Overview of Federal Law and USEPA Regulations for Urban Runoff

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 445-454 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry A. Roesner ◽  
Paul Traina
Keyword(s):  
Water Quality ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Water Quality Management ◽  
Urban Runoff ◽  
The United States ◽  
Storm Water ◽  
Water Quality Control ◽  
Drainage Systems ◽  
Wet Weather

Within the last three years, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) has taken two significant steps with respect to regulating the quality of storm water discharges from urban areas. The first of these is the development of Final Rules and Regulations for Storm Water Discharges from urban areas with separated waste water and storm drainage systems. Published in late 1990, the rule requires all municipalities with populations over 100,000 to apply for a permit to discharge storm water under the USEPA's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The permit application must include, among other things, a plan to reduce the pollutants in urban runoff to the “Maximum Extent Practicable”. The second step is the publication in January, 1993, of a draft policy regulating discharges from combined sewer systems. These two initiatives for water quality control of wet weather discharges from urban drainage systems are significant steps forward in a national program to reduce pollution contributions to receiving waters in urban areas. This paper provides an overview of the requirements of these two wet weather water quality management programs.

Review of the State of the Art in Analysis of the Economics of Water Resources Infrastructure

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Jeuland
Keyword(s):  
Water Resources ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ◽  
Cost Benefit ◽  
The United States ◽  
Army Corps ◽  
Water Infrastructure ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Water Control ◽  
Methodological Innovation

Water resources represent an essential input to most human activities, but harnessing them requires significant infrastructure. Such water control allows populations to cope with stochastic water availability, preserving uses during droughts while protecting against the ravages of floods. Economic analysis is particularly valuable for helping to guide infrastructure investment choices, and for comparing the relative value of so called hard and soft (noninfrastructure) approaches to water management. The historical evolution of the tools for conducting such economic analysis is considered. Given the multimillennial history of human reliance on water infrastructure, it may be surprising that economic assessments of its value are a relatively recent development. Owing to the need to justify the rapid deployment of major public-sector financing outlays for water infrastructure in the early 20th century, government agencies in the United States—the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation—were early pioneers in developing these applications. Their work faced numerous technical challenges, first addressed in the drafting of the cost-benefit norms of the “Green Book.” Subsequent methodological innovation then worked to address a suite of challenges related to nonmarket uses of water, stochastic hydrology, water systems interdependencies, the social opportunity cost of capital, and impacts on secondary markets, as well as endogenous sociocultural feedbacks. The improved methods that have emerged have now been applied extensively around the world, with applications increasingly focused on the Global South where the best infrastructure development opportunities remain today. The dominant tools for carrying out such economic analyses are simulation or optimization hydroeconomic models (HEM), but there are also other options: economy wide water-economy models (WEMs), sociohydrological models (SHMs), spreadsheet-based partial equilibrium cost-benefit models, and others. Each of these has different strengths and weaknesses. Notable innovations are also discussed. For HEMs, these include stochastic, fuzz, and robust optimization, respectively, as well as co-integration with models of other sectors (e.g., energy systems models). Recent cutting-edge work with WEMs and spreadsheet-based CBA models, meanwhile, has focused on linking these tools with spatially resolved HEMs. SHMs have only seen limited application to infrastructure valuation problems but have been useful for illuminating the paradox of flood management infrastructure increasing the incidence and severity of flood damages, and for explaining the co-evolution of water-based development and environmental concerns, which ironically then devalues the original infrastructure. Other notable innovations are apparent in multicriteria decision analysis, and in game-theoretic modeling of noncooperative water institutions. These advances notwithstanding, several issues continue to challenge accurate and helpful economic appraisal of water infrastructure and should be the subject of future investigations in this domain. These include better assessment of environmental and distributional impacts, incorporation of empirically based representations of costs and benefits, and greater attention to the opportunity costs of infrastructure. Existing tools are well evolved from those of a few decades ago, supported by enhancements in scientific understanding and computational power. Yet, they do appear to systematically produce inflated estimations of the net benefits of water infrastructure. Tackling existing shortcomings will require continued interdisciplinary collaboration between economists and scholars from other disciplines, to allow leveraging of new theoretical insights, empirical data analyses, and modeling innovations.

Building an Urban Food System Through UDC Food Hubs

2019 ◽  
pp. 511-532
Author(s):  
Sabine O'Hara ◽  
Dwane Jones ◽  
Harris B. Trobman
Keyword(s):  
Nutrition Education ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Water Reuse ◽  
Food System ◽  
Green Roofs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Food Distribution ◽  
Food Hubs ◽  
Urban Food System

The Landgrant College of the University of the District of Columbia embodies the university's unique mission as the only exclusively urban land-grant university in the United States. With most of the world's population now living in urban areas, this mission is relevant to cities worldwide. The UDC urban food hubs reimagine our food system as diversified, urban, and encompassing food production, food preparation, food distribution, and waste and water recovery. The hubs utilize bio-intensive hydroponic and aquaponic systems and green roofs to maximize productivity on small urban spaces; kitchens as business incubators and training facilities for food processing and nutrition education; waste and water reuse through composting, rain water capture, and green infrastructure. Each of these components offers opportunities for business startups and capacity building. The hubs also re-connect urban neighborhoods to nature. This chapter describes the urban food hubs, their locations, and the training, wellness, and leadership opportunities they offer to UDC students and DC residents.

Building an Urban Food System Through UDC Food Hubs

2018 ◽  
pp. 116-143
Author(s):  
Sabine O'Hara ◽  
Dwane Jones ◽  
Harris B. Trobman
Keyword(s):  
Nutrition Education ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Water Reuse ◽  
Food System ◽  
Green Roofs ◽  
The United States ◽  
Food Distribution ◽  
Food Hubs ◽  
Urban Food System

The Landgrant College of the University of the District of Columbia embodies the university's unique mission as the only exclusively urban land-grant university in the United States. With most of the world's population now living in urban areas, this mission is relevant to cities worldwide. The UDC urban food hubs reimagine our food system as diversified, urban, and encompassing food production, food preparation, food distribution, and waste and water recovery. The hubs utilize bio-intensive hydroponic and aquaponic systems and green roofs to maximize productivity on small urban spaces; kitchens as business incubators and training facilities for food processing and nutrition education; waste and water reuse through composting, rain water capture, and green infrastructure. Each of these components offers opportunities for business startups and capacity building. The hubs also re-connect urban neighborhoods to nature. This chapter describes the urban food hubs, their locations, and the training, wellness, and leadership opportunities they offer to UDC students and DC residents.

Assessing the Evidence: Promoting Economic Development in Rural North Carolina with Education, Workforce Development, Infrastructure, Healthcare, and Leadership

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie McCall
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Workforce Development ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Small Firms ◽  
The United States ◽  
Population Increase ◽  
Small Business Development ◽  
Population Loss ◽  
Development Outcomes

Like many other states, North Carolina’s population dynamics have shown a definitive shift toward greater urbanization. Some of the population increase in urban areas is in-migration from outside the state. However, net population loss in many of North Carolina’s rural areas has been on the rise for years. Population outflows of this magnitude can bring an array of unique challenges for rural small firms. Chronic rural issues like unfavorable geography, endemic poverty, and poor infrastructure for business can pose serious economic development challenges. According to some scholars, level of rurality or geographical isolation is the primary variable in explaining why economic development outcomes vary across the United States. We assess the literature to determine what role small business development and complimentary strategies have in rural economic growth.

Do national welfare systems have an influence on interdisciplinary collaborations within schools of social work and their communities? The case of the Nordic countries

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunn S Hutchinson ◽  
Yossi Korazim-Kőrösy
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Interdisciplinary Collaboration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Educational Programs ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
National Welfare ◽  
Schools Of Social Work

This study of educational programs in schools of social work in the Nordic countries focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching, research, field practice, and community involvement. The study makes comparisons with similar studies in the United States, Israel, Canada, and Hungary. It takes those studies a step further by discussing whether the national welfare system influences interdisciplinary collaboration in the educational programs in the respective countries.

Towards an interdisciplinary knowledge exchange model

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago DE FRANCISCO ◽  
Diego MAZO
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Design Environment ◽  
Interdisciplinary Knowledge ◽  
One Year ◽  
The University ◽  
Common Situation

Universities and corporates, in Europe and the United States, have come to a win-win relationship to accomplish goals that serve research and industry. However, this is not a common situation in Latin America. Knowledge exchange and the co-creation of new projects by applying academic research to solve company problems does not happen naturally.To bridge this gap, the Design School of Universidad de los Andes, together with Avianca, are exploring new formats to understand the knowledge transfer impact in an open innovation network aiming to create fluid channels between different stakeholders. The primary goal was to help Avianca to strengthen their innovation department by apply design methodologies. First, allowing design students to proposed novel solutions for the traveller experience. Then, engaging Avianca employees to learn the design process. These explorations gave the opportunity to the university to apply design research and academic findings in a professional and commercial environment.After one year of collaboration and ten prototypes tested at the airport, we can say that Avianca’s innovation mindset has evolved by implementing a user-centric perspective in the customer experience touch points, building prototypes and quickly iterate. Furthermore, this partnership helped Avianca’s employees to experience a design environment in which they were actively interacting in the innovation process.

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