Delivering and evaluating multiple flood risk benefits

Flood-prone cities have a stack of promising ideas for managing stormwater—but no clear way to actually build them or prove they are worth the money. This project tackles a practical bottleneck. Decades of research have produced a long menu of flood-risk measures: permeable pavements, rain gardens, green roofs, swales, and other features that soak up water while also cooling streets, cleaning runoff, and adding green space. Yet city planners, developers, and infrastructure agencies cannot easily decide which combinations work best, how to install them in existing streets, or how to compare their full costs and benefits against traditional concrete drains. The gap is not in invention but in delivery and evaluation. If the research succeeds, it will give cities a systematic way to retrofit flood resilience into existing neighbourhoods and embed it into new developments from the start. That could shift urban flood management from a single-purpose, reactive expense—digging bigger pipes after a disaster—to a multi-benefit investment that also improves air quality, reduces heat stress, and makes streets more liveable. The work is applied and practical: it aims to change how planners, engineers, and developers actually make decisions about the fabric of cities.