Effects of Maintenance on the Efficiency of NBS for Urban Flood Management

Abstract: As rain events are likely to intensify and the proportion of impervious areas in cities increases, greater demands are put on stormwater management. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have become more popular over the past decades to be integrated into the stormwater strategy in order to reduce the volume of runoff in cities. For NBS to be effective over long term, maintenance must be prioritized. This study addressed two questions, what are the difficulties in modeling (lack of) maintenance over time and what are the consequences in terms of water quantity with inadequate maintenance on the long- term efficiency of NBS?. This was found by developing a hydrodynamic model in SWMM, where three NBS types were modeled, rain garden, permeable pavement, and infiltration trench. The efficiency of maintenance was investigated by creating several scenarios where different parameters were identified to represent maintenance. The parameters were varied for different precipitation events, as the effect of maintenance depends on the type of precipitation used. In general, inadequate maintenance has been proven to have little impact on rain events with a return period of 2-years, while a large difference could be seen for intense rains. Two consequences as a result of an absence of maintenance are overgrown vegetation and clogging of the media. Clogging was investigated for all three NBS types, and was found to have a large impact on its efficiency over time. The result also shows that despite the inadequate management, NBS can still contribute to manage stormwater, but with lower efficiency.