New CRC Technical Report - Urban Stormwater Quality Program
July 05, 2005
CRC Technical Report 05/11 'Guidelines for Evaluating the Financial, Ecological and Social Aspects of Urban Stormwater Management Measures to Improve Waterway Health' by AndrŽ Taylor is available for downloading now. The final CRC Technical Report version will be available for downloading end of September 2005.
Preface
Increasingly, urban stormwater managers in Australia are seeking to make decisions about the use of management measures within the context of the so-called triple-bottom-line. That is, such decisions consider the potential financial, social and ecological impacts.
The Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology (the CRC) has developed these guidelines to assist triple-bottom-line assessment of new stormwater projects that aim to improve waterway health. For example, the assessment process may be used to help choose a design of a stormwater treatment
and re-use system or the location of new infrastructure. The guidelines are flexible enough to be used on structural and non-structural projects.
These guidelines allow users to choose one of three levels of assessment which are commensurate with the scale, complexity and potential impact of the project.
This approach has been taken to allow stormwater managers to find an appropriate balance between the degree of rigour undertaken in the assessment and the resources needed to undertake the assessment.
To assist the financial element of the assessment, a life cycle costing module has recently been built into version 3 of the CRC
s MUSIC model (i.e. the
Model
for Urban Stormwater Improvement Conceptualisation
: see www.toolkit.net.au).
This module allows users to estimate likely cost elements and the overall life cycle cost of common structural stormwater measures to improve waterway health.
This module was developed following an analysis of the cost of Australian measures, and the development of algorithms that relate the size of measures to their cost elements.
For the financial, social and ecological elements of the assessment, these guidelines explain how to use a multi criteria analysis procedure as a decision support tool. Users will also need to make reference to other sources of information when using the procedure (e.g. expert opinion, local stakeholder opinion, outputs from pollutant export models such as MUSIC, relevant ecological objectives for stormwater management, relevant environmental valuation studies, etc.).
Guidance on key sources of information and appropriate stakeholder participation techniques have been built into the assessment procedure.
These guidelines also contain condensed information from the literature on a wide variety of costs and benefits that may result from stormwater projects (i.e. externalities) to help stormwater managers make decisions during the assessment process. This is needed as high-quality, local benefit-cost data on
social, ecological or water infrastructure-related externalities is often not available and/or not practical to collect given the resources typically available to stormwater managers (e.g. time and money).
These guidelines, supported by the new life cycle costing module in MUSIC should substantially assist urban stormwater managers to make more structured,
informed, rigorous, participatory, transparent, defendable, socially acceptable, ecologically sustainable and more cost-effective decisions.
Tim Fletcher
Program Leader, Urban Stormwater Quality
Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment
Hydrology
The final CRC Technical Report version will be available for downloading end of September 2005.
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