An Integrated Framework of Green Stormwater Infrastructure Planning—A Review

Abstract

Conventional stormwater management infrastructures show low levels of sustainability owing to the consistent impact of urbanization and climate change, and the green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) has been identified as a more sustainable alternative approach. According to a systematic review, the articles and papers concerning GSI planning are fragmented, especially those discussing the planning steps; thus, an integrated framework of GSI planning is developed here to guide forthcoming planning. In the facility aspect, the research status and prospects of four critical planning steps (i.e., objective formulation, type/scenario evaluation, quantity/scale determination, and site selection) are discussed, and a method of quantifying the relationship between GSI and ecosystem services is given. In the ecosystem aspect, ecosystem resilience promotion is regarded as an approach to guarantee the interaction between hydrological processes and ecological processes, which maintains the sustainable provision of ecosystem services produced by GSI in diverse disturbances. Proposals for future GSI planning research are put forward as comprehensive consideration of the two abovementioned aspects to harvest ecosystem services from GSI directly and to promote the anti-disturbance ability of the ecosystem to guarantee the stable provision of ecosystem services indirectly, which are conducive to the social, economic, and environmental sustainability of GSI.