Blog Posts: stormwater

Forests everywhere alter the movement, quality and availability of water. The world’s urban leaders need to account for the role of forests in securing clean water for residents and the agricultural lands that cities rely on.

Green infrastructure can mitigate most of the world's major water problems, but investment has been held back by lack of certainty about returns. Our new methodology helps lay out how to measure the costs and benefits of green and gray infrastructure projects.

The people of Fiji, one of the countries most threatened by climate change, are taking adaptation and resilience into their own hands. Vulnerable neighborhoods in Lautoka City are building infrastructure to withstand stronger storms, and nurturing coastal ecosystems to defend against sea level rise.

Water quality trading can spur more cost-effective reductions of pollution. But they're most effective when they have a strong driver, like a cap, and the new memo isn't as instructive as it could be on that front.

Home is a place of stability and security. It is a place where families come together to work towards and celebrate mutual prosperity. But as the human and economic toll of climate change continues to rise, we face legitimate risk of this sense of home being uprooted.

In the last weeks, we've seen deadly heat waves and wildfires in the U.S. West, massive floods in South Asia and the ravages of hurricanes in the Caribbean. What does science tell us about the links between these extreme weather events and a changing climate?

Seaside communities from South Asia to the Caribbean have suffered terribly from flooding. Arivudai Nambi Appadurai, India Adaptation Strategy Head for the Climate Resilience Practice and WRI India, distills how they can adapt, with a focus on the dynamics of environmental justice and sustainable development.

The Chesapeake Bay is one of America's most treasured waterways, but also one of the most polluted. Experts in this WRI Podcast examine nutrient trading as a potential solution.

Restoration of the Chesapeake Bay will require reducing pollution from all sources, including urban stormwater runoff, which is one of the most difficult and expensive kinds of pollution to control. While stormwater contributes only 16-17 percent of the bay’s nutrient pollution—the rest comes from the air, and runoff from farms and wastewater treatment plants—dealing with it comprises 67 percent of states’ Bay pollution management costs.

A new paper by WRI and the...

Florida's Treasure Coast has turned toxic this summer, as a foul-smelling algae bloom resembling guacamole has made some of the Sunshine State's beaches untouchable. One cause is the controlled release of water from an over-full Lake Okeechobee into local rivers that flow east to the Atlantic and west to the Gulf of Mexico.