Adoption of Integrated Blue-Green Infrastructure for Sustainable and Resilient Urban Development
The exponential growth of urban areas is putting a strain on urban land and has serious implications on the availability of blue and green spaces to the city dwellers. Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) is an interconnected network of natural and designed water bodies and green & open spaces. Integrating blue-green infrastructure offers multiple benefits like planning for water sensitive cities, water storage, water purification, sustainable urban drainage system, enhancing biodiversity, urban flood mitigation, thermal comfort, carbon sequestration, public health and well-being and many more etc. It is an emerging nature-based solution (NBS) solution for making the urban development sustainable and climate resilient. There are many cities globally which have made a conscious decision to promote blue-green infrastructure in place of grey infrastructure or complimentary to grey infrastructure. However, in Indian context, there are still barriers in adoption to the concept of integrated development of blue-green infrastructure. The barriers can be in the form of lack of awareness in decision makers at local level, provisions in policy, urban planning regulations and laws, examples supporting benefits of BGI etc.
