Sustainable Communities and Green Infrastructure Guidance

A new report, Enhancing Sustainable Communities With Green Infrastructure: A guide to help communities better manage stormwater while achieving other environmental, public health, social, and economic benefits, aims to help local governments, water utilities, nonprofit organizations, neighborhood groups, and other stakeholders integrate green infrastructure strategies into plans that can transform their communities. Many communities that want to use green infrastructure approaches face technical, regulatory, financial, and institutional obstacles that limit widespread implementation. This report serves as a guide to develop a plan that can overcome these obstacles for neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions of all sizes. It also can help stakeholders create a vision for how green infrastructure can enhance their communities beyond reducing stormwater runoff, and directs readers to other resources that provide more detailed information that can be tailored to communities’ particular climate, goals, and circumstances.

The report is paired with a blog post by Joel Beauvais, Associate Administrator for EPA’s Office of Policy, on how green infrastructure is helping to transform neighborhoods, and a graphic to help communities quickly envision the 10 steps to developing a sustainable community and green infrastructure plan. You can also find photographs of green infrastructure approaches in communities on the Flickr page shown below.

• Read the report: http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/green-infrastructure.html
• Read the blog post: http://blog.epa.gov/epaconnect/2014/10/green-infrastructure-helping-to-transform-neighborhoods-in-cleveland-and-across-the-nation/
• View the graphic: http://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/green-infrastructure-10steps-scip.html
• View the photos in Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usepagov/sets/72157648579274857/