An Integrated Environmental Assessment of Green and Gray Infrastructure Strategies for Robust Decision Making

The robustness of a range of watershed-scale green and gray drainage strategies in the future is explored through comprehensive modeling of a fully integrated urban wastewater system case. Four socio-economic future scenarios, defined by parameters affecting the environmental performance of the system, are proposed to account for the uncertain variability of conditions in the year 2050. A regret-based approach is applied to assess the relative performance of strategies in multiple impact categories (environmental, economic, and social) as well as to evaluate their robustness across future scenarios. The concept of regret proves useful in identifying performance trade-offs and recognizing states of the world most critical to decisions. The study highlights the robustness of green strategies (particularly rain gardens, resulting in half the regret of most options) over end-of-pipe gray alternatives (surface water separation or sewer and storage rehabilitation), which may be costly (on average, 25% of the total regret of these options) and tend to focus on sewer flooding and CSO alleviation while compromising on downstream system performance (this accounts for around 50% of their total regret). Trade-offs and scenario regrets observed in the analysis suggest that the combination of green and gray strategies may still offer further potential for robustness.