Climate-Resilient Planning for Urban Stormwater and Wastewater Utilities: Workshop Proceedings

WRF in partnership with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, the Water Utility Climate Alliance, NOAA's Mid-Atlantic Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program, and the RAND Corporation convened an invitation-only workshop in July 2019 in New York City. The workshop brought together leaders from 15 major metropolitan water utilities in the U.S. and Canada, and other international experts to discuss current practices, lessons learned, and new ideas for developing actionable rainfall projections and incorporating climate-informed stormwater flows into planning processes. In addition, the workshop offered an opportunity to lay the groundwork for future progress on this critical issue, including gaps in the existing best practice, critical research needs, and suggested next steps. The research report provides an informative summary of the workshop proceedings that will be useful to utilities and municipalities as they examine climate-resilient planning for urban stormwater and flood management. The supplemental project paper, An Action Agenda for the Water Sector to Advance Methods for Achieving Integrated Climate Resilience (project 5058), expands on the next steps identified in the workshop proceedings, and proposes an action agenda to further advance existing best practices, field testing of new approaches, and critical research needs for utilities wanting examples for their own application of climate data, as well as the climate science community to inform next steps in developing climate information. Published in 2020.