Scientists, along with the public and private sectors, are abuzz with the potential for "green infrastructure," an approach for water management that protects, restores, or mimics the natural water cycle. This approach is economical: Wetland construction or restoration can be far more cost effective than building a new water treatment plant. Green infrastructure also lessens manufacturing risks, while it enhances community safety and quality of life. For example, restored wetlands would improve water reliability for manufacturers, create habitats and open spaces for wildlife, and dampen the risks of drought and floods on public water supplies. The big, unanswered question about green infrastructure is whether managers would be better able to control water systems if green infrastructure was coupled with traditional gray infrastructure, such as reservoir operations. Modeling, data, and decision-support tools for blending gray and green water infrastructure, however, do not yet exist. This Critical Resilient Interdependent Infrastructure Systems and Processes (CRISP) project advances a modelling framework that couples gray and green water infrastructure systems and processes. The project also incorporate the effects of economically motivated human players into the coupled system. Specifically, this collaboration of scientists and water managers aims to minimize the impacts of extreme weather (drought and flood) on infrastructure processes in the chemical, petroleum, and agricultural sectors along the coastal basins of Texas. This work leads to: (1) A knowledge exchange between water-rights holders and regulators, including between private and public-sector actors. (2) An online learning platform to disseminate project results into curricula to train corporate sustainability officers and river authorities. (3) Training at least three graduate students, three postdocs, and many undergraduate students, including some from a minority-serving institution (Texas A&M University at Kingsville), and nurturing the collaboration between Arizona State and Texas A&M at Kingsville Universities.
The big, unanswered question about green infrastructure is whether the benefits - improved base flow reliability, damped peak flows, local storage - might be better controlled by being coupled to traditional gray infrastructure, such as reservoir operations. Modeling, data, and decision-support tools for blending gray and green water infrastructure do not exist at present. This project advances a control-theory framework that couples gray and green infrastructure subsystems and processes, and explicitly incorporates the effects of economically motivated human players into the system. The project framework minimizes the negative effects of extreme weather (drought and flood) on infrastructure processes in the chemical, petroleum, and agricultural sectors of the coastal basins of Texas. The work includes an integrated analysis of grey infrastructure for water storage and conveyance along with green infrastructure that provides environmental and aesthetic benefits. Although gray and green infrastructure are often intermingled, they are usually analyzed independently. For this integrated analysis, the engineering component is a model of ground and surface water interactions in both arid and humid regions in Texas. The computer science aspect is a synthesis of coupled grey-green infrastructure systems and the generation of environmental service flows. The socioeconomic study is an application of competitive game theory that seeks to understand and augment water trading to promote in-stream flows from water rights that have been allocated for commercial, industrial, or municipal use. The project also includes visualization and stakeholder engagement in the application of water trading.
