Managing Stormwater as a Complex Adaptive System

Abstract

Understanding the cumulative impact of a set of stormwater interventions is of paramount importance in urban stormwater planning. A model is introduced to study the effect of 179 stormwater projects in the Cub Run watershed in Fairfax County, Virginia. The results showed gains in environmental benefits when the system was treated as a network of interacting and coevolving measures. The study demonstrates the importance of considering broader system benefits in the planning of stormwater projects instead of point performance. Under different implementation strategies, the dynamics of coevolution reveals a fixed pattern of growth in the number of projects to be implemented. However, their environmental benefits are not necessarily the same. Thus, any decision to advance some projects for early implementation would have a long-term impact on the system’s overall trajectory. Furthermore, at a certain threshold, the environmental benefits from these interventions could diminish since more control does not yield a linear increase in benefits.