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Glossary

 

Adaptive Management

Master Planning needs to continuously adjust infrastructure projects to monitoring results of ecosystem impacts from earlier infrastructure projects, to the emergence of innovative technologies, and to new challenges of climate change, emerging contaminants of concern, etc. 

Eco-Block

 “Eco-blocks” incorporate architectural innovations, wind and solar power, green roof and wall cooling, rainwater harvesting, water reuse and energy recovery, and nutrient recycling into community gardens, can be nearly “off-the-grid” in both energy and water, and can be located at transportation “hubs”.  These new designs of infrastructure may cost less in dollars and will both improve the quality of life in urban communities and begin to protect and restore the ecological Commons.    

Decentralized

Decentralized systems are located near the use of water or generation of wastewater.  Some of the innovative treatment and resource recovery technologies would be “embedded” in subdivisions, apartment complexes, or individual homes and offices.  Other functions would be taken over by vegetative “green infrastructure”, such as green roofs and walls, trees, and swales along roads and restored streams, riparian areas, and wetlands. 

Green Reserve

EPA’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund currently requires that 20% of funding be set aside for water-efficiency, energy-efficiency, green infrastructure, or other environmentally innovative projects.

Integration

Leading-edge infrastructure experts are now suggesting that “networks” of engineered and green energy and water systems need to be integrated and also be co-engineered with transportation, solid waste, buildings, and other urban infrastructure management.  The lessons of nature are that such integration can lead to significant synergies of design, cost-savings, and an abundance of positive benefits for society.  

Network Infrastructure

A birds-eye view of the new infrastructure would reveal “networks” of decentralized, repurposed, and at times hybridized systems.  Water and sewer lines might be slip-lined and repurposed for potable or reclaimed water, water storage and distribution, and heat recovery.  Monitoring and control technologies would be key elements in managing these systems and in protecting public health and the environment.

These engineered and green networks mimic the natural systems of nodes and links in nature, where water both recycles and supports life at a local scale, but also is a linkage and transport mechanism across a landscape and into the atmosphere.   Adopting these systems in cities and towns can cost less to provide water and sanitation services than current approaches and can also add significant benefits in terms of air quality, energy savings and production, recreation, beauty and aesthetics, increased property values, and jobs.  Innovative pricing, incentives, and new performance-based regulatory mechanisms will be required to ensure that these sustainable practices are adopted and that the remaining watershed and global “externalities” are also addressed by developers, homeowners, industries, and municipalities.  

Smart Clean Green

The genius of science and design in the 21st Century is the discovery of “smart, clean, and green” ways to capture the value of resources.  “Smart” because they unlock the complex designs of nature and use information and signaling to achieve efficiencies.  “Clean” because they capture and use resources and methods that don’t involve significant externalities in extraction or disposal.  And, “green” because they rely to a much higher degree on vegetation, and in the process begin to restore the natural ecosystem and its wide and deep benefits.  

Sustainable Water Management

An emerging paradigm relies on design principles found in nature:  in particular, integrated systems, efficiency and reuse, and adaptation to local context.  Many of the new high-performance treatment technologies, such as membranes, “mimic” biological and chemical designs that scientists are discovering in nature (biomimicry).  Just as recently found in the energy arena, there are alternative approaches that can restore natural resource patterns and functions found across a landscape.  These new design approaches create a wealth of services and benefits at the local level and can help restore the ecological and societal well-being of the global Commons as well.

Traditional Water Management

Traditional water management has relied on a low-tech, industrial-scale engineering and economic model mostly developed in the 1800s.  With a goal of public health protection, big pipe systems were built to transport clean water into and wastewater out of urban neighborhoods.  

Water Commons

The “Commons” is a useful term to describe the space in which natural organisms, including humans, interact.  There is an ecosystem web of life with complex interdependencies of species, natural resources, energy, and soils and water.  There are also complex interdependencies of people in human societies and economies, which in turn rely on nature’s services for their survival.  The Commons can be used to describe that space of interactions and interdependencies that affect the well-being of all the individual participants, both human and non-human.