Boosting community engagement around blue-green infrastructure

As we all must adapt to living with the changing climate, how we view water must also change. One response has been to build blue-green infrastructure instead of traditional engineering. This could be a sustainable drainage system or raingarden that becomes both a recreational space and alleviates flooding.

These types of projects can bring multiple benefits to communities and the environment but who knows what they really are?

Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) produced a report about engaging with communities to create schemes that work with and for the local community and how to involve stakeholders from the start.

The Building Back Blue report highlighted the benefits of multifunctional schemes such as sustainable urban drainage systems (SuDS) and developing urban green spaces to manage water flow or store excess rainwater to stop it overwhelming sewer networks. This can reduce flood risks and minimise the need for combined sewer overflows to discharge into waterways. The communities who benefit from such projects, CAS said, should be involved and engaged with the planning, design, delivery and maintenance these multi-functional spaces. The report suggested that engaging with local people and groups earlier empowered people to be a part of decision making and ensured they supported a scheme because they could see and understand its benefits.

Emma Ash, senior water policy officer at CAS, said the report was a starting point for thinking and talking about this kind of infrastructure.

She said: “Scottish Water and the government are really keen for blue-green solutions to be used a lot more and this report is an important part of the jigsaw to make sure everybody is involved; that communities are seen as an important element in the design process that they need to be part of co-designing.”

Ash added that momentum will only build after communities become interested and better decisions can be made because of that involvement.

“Once we’ve got people understanding what it is and what it can do as a solution, it will drive more interest in it and push people to ask for it on a bigger scale. That will be needed to meet the many challenges of climate change and flood risk,” Ash said.

So what did CAS learn about talking to people about these types of schemes?

Firstly, the type of language used was incredibly important – from commonly used words to water sector jargon, it all had an effect. It became clear that people had different understandings of words and terms.

“What surprised me was how the sector language used was often misunderstood, even within stakeholder workshops. ‘Surface water’ to the local authority was what ran off of roads but to the drinking water regulator it was the water that came out of reservoirs.”

She said this misunderstanding really resonated with stakeholders when a more plain English approach to communication was proposed.

Another language issue the report highlighted was the importance of avoiding using the words floods or flooding.

“Although that’s the big risk and one of the main reasons for blue-green infrastructure, using the word flooding always seemed to switch people off in areas that hadn’t experienced it,” Ash said.

Instead, she suggested talking about the multiple benefits a scheme could bring to the area and how it could benefit different groups.

“Blue-green is about much more than dealing with flooding. It’s about making water a visible part of people’s lives and showing how water can benefit them and where they live with incorporated play areas,” Ash said. She added that this idea of “placemaking” was far more appealing and grabbed people’s interest over flooding.

However, in an admittedly wet country, Ash said the biggest challenge is to overcome the attitude that ‘it’s always rained, why should we care now?’.

“It’ll take time and need to be done at national and community level to change the perception of water and how we value it. Scarcity is a growing problem too as climate change alters how and when we get rain,” she said.

Following COP26 in November, hosted in Glasgow, there has been a growing interest in such nature-based solutions and sustainable drainage schemes as Ash said people used the event to push conversations in these areas. This, she said, led to a hope it would now be easier for local authorities to understand the benefits of blue-green infrastructure and nature-based solutions.

When done right, engagement can be empowering for stakeholders and constructive for those developing a project, Ash explained. She described engagement as a spectrum and said it should be about a lot more than groups in a town hall.

“Engagement should help identify things we hadn’t thought about. With blue-green it’s a iterative process – the solution we design will adapt to the landscape and the community’s needs as we go along,” Ash said.

“These projects should deliver multiple-purpose benefits and it’s only as we speak to a community and find out what they need that we find out what to include. Town hall type events can be quite selective and not representative of the whole community.”

An example of successful engagement was a local authority hosting a fly-through event where people could watch a computer-animated simulation of what the completed project would look like, what the play spaces would be, and how it would look during a flood.

This prompted specific feedback about the space and the work that ranged from keenness to preserve existing features to input about positioning of the play area in relation to water.

These projects will only become more commonplace across the UK. Policy was introduced in Scotland and Wales in 2015 that all homebuilding had to incorporate SuDS, even for a single house.

SuDS are designed to mimic natural drainage and filter and retain rainfall where it lands to prevent systems from becoming overwhelmed during storm events.

Ash said Scottish Water has a policy of “no more in, and what’s in out”, which means that no development can allow new surface water to enter the main drainage network. The “what’s in, out” part means reducing any excess water that is already there through retrofitting blue green schemes.

She explained the more engagement, the more benefits a scheme can deliver to people and the environment. “In the past when it’s a drain pipe underground all the public are interested in is the pipe not flooding. We trust engineers to do that,” Ash said. “But when it’s a surface solution, the responses can be anything around lighting, bins and how people can use the space. It can seem quite small but it’s getting people on board with the concept and earning their trust by not losing things they enjoy.”

The report set out four key recommendations:

• The Scottish Government needs to create frameworks to embed adaptation to climate change in decision making

Blue-green solutions require a fundamental shift in how surface water is thought about and managed. This, the report said, would be reliant upon stakeholder collaboration across sectors and with wider society.

• Communication and awareness raising of adaptation

Communication from all organisations should be clear about what roles communities can and should play in the design and delivery of schemes. This empowers communities to partner in and influence decision making.

• Identify and adopt effective community engagement frameworks

These should aim to assess benefits that are likely to have most impact on the community; develop clear objectives for community contribution; and develop an evaluation stage to ensure the community is enabled to work with stakeholders.

• Commit to use simple and common language around blue-green solutions to increase understanding

Only 5% of respondents had heard of blue-green solutions and 16% had heard of SuDS. CAS said communication therefore “needs to meet communities at their level of experience of water management issues” and use alternative less technical terms.

This may mean sector terminology is replaced with plain English terms such as, ‘rainwater run-off’ or ‘storm water’ and ‘nature-based drainage’, ‘sponge planting’ or ‘rain playgrounds’.