Environmental Community Action, Inc. (ECO-Action) helps vulnerable communities in Georgia prevent, confront, and resolve environmental health threats. Collaborating with local universities and others, ECO-Action has been using green infrastructure to address frequent flooding. ECO-Action partnered with Earth Economics to analyze the public economic benefits of the proposed Green Infrastructure Conceptual Plans. Analysis focuses on the stormwater management benefits of 1) greenways, 2) street trees, and 3) cisterns and vaults.
The City of Kent and South King County are home to immigrant and refugee families from around the world. In response to calls for community space, World Relief Western Washington began developing the Paradise Parking Plots Community Garden in 2016, transforming a frequently flooded parking lot at Hillside Church into a vibrant multi-cultural garden oasis and resilience hub. Earth Economics assessed the ecoystem services benefits and the benefit-cost ratio of the community gardens, which provide gardeners with $127,000 in market value in foods produced each year.
The Hunts Point community is proactively looking to reintroduce nature-based solutions to help reduce pressing environmental challenges, like persistent flooding, while also providing broad community benefits like access to parks and recreation, better air quality, and protection from extreme heat. Nature-based solutions have proven to be cost-effective for many resilience challenges throughout the world, often providing a high return-on-investment as measured through public and private benefits.
A primer for water leaders on how to debt-finance distributed infrastructure projects and consumer rebates.
