Community Conservancy International's Green Solution Project

Green Solution Projects improve water quality by using soil, plants, and natural processes to capture, filter, and clean polluted urban and stormwater runoff, while creating new parks, natural habitat, recreation, and other open space lands.

Can we solve polluted runoff problems by restoring paved, urbanized areas to parks, recreation, habitat, and green open space?

The conventional assumption is that there is not enough land in developed areas to effectively use green approaches to naturally clean polluted runoff-that green approaches are "nice," but limited.

Community Conservancy International's (CCI) Green Solution Project overturns conventional assumptions about the role that green approaches can play in naturally cleaning polluted runoff in already urbanized and developed areas. By using state-of-the-art digital technology to integrate mapping, innovative engineering, and conservation and community needs, Community Conservancy International's Green Solution Project provides a strategic road map to designing "smart" green spaces that use soils and plants to naturally capture and clean polluted runoff. CCI focuses on unpaving impervious areas (and retrofitting pervious areas) on existing public lands, so that these lands can act as natural filters while also providing badly-needed open space opportunities.

Until CCI's Green Solution Project approach, it was widely believed that there just weren't enough lands to make this multiple-benefit approach a feasible solution to polluted runoff problems.

CCI's Green Solution Project approach focuses on:

• Smart, strategic conversion of paved public lands to green spaces

• Retrofit of existing grass landscapes to capture, clean and recycle runoff

• Using soils and plants to naturally capture and filter pollutants from runoff

• Creating new parks, wildlife habitats, and recreation and open space lands

• Re-charging groundwater supplies

• Improving water supplies by storing cleaned runoff for re-use

This innovative and practical approach to serious water pollution problems can help cities, counties, and civic leaders throughout California meet their polluted runoff clean-up needs, re-charge groundwater supplies, and create new parks, habitat, recreation and open space lands in park-poor communities. The Community Conservancy International technical team includes Psomas and GreenInfo Network. This Green Solution approach is essential to effectively address runoff pollution produced throughout the United States, particularly in areas where the natural functions of watersheds, rivers, and the soil itself have been dramatically altered.

As part of Community Conservancy International's focus on critical problems affecting people and the environment, CCI identified polluted urban and stormwater runoff as an increasingly serious and pressing need in California, especially in Los Angeles County, where extensive urbanization has resulted in vast areas of paved surfaces and high daily volumes of contaminated runoff. These same urbanized areas face pressing water supply problems, with increasing needs for creative use of stormwater recycling. In addition, L.A. County's urban areas are among the most park-poor in the United States, lack natural open space that serve as a healthy respite to city dwellers from urban congestion, and have lost nearly all of their native habitat lands.

CCI's Exciting Green Solution Findings

The Green Solution Project is a major paradigm shift, pioneering a new approach by focusing on existing public lands and on unpaving impervious areas and retrofitting porous areas on these lands so that they can naturally clean polluted runoff while also providing important park, habitat, and other green open space. (For more information, go to www.ccint.org/greensolution.html.)

• Green Solutions can help clean up polluted runoff on a regional watershed scale – especially in already developed, heavily-urbanized areas.

• Yes, there is land available for Green Solutions. In L.A. County, CCI identified nearly 20,000 acres of existing public lands that are suitable for strategic conversion to "smart" parks, habitat, and open space.

• Green Solutions can help Los Angeles County meet nearly 50 percent of its polluted runoff clean-up need.

• In Los Angeles County, implementing Green Solutions on the public lands CCI identified would treat polluted runoff from 360,000 urbanized acres.

• Green Solutions can help urban communities create networks of new green space in cement-heavy, park-poor areas, while boosting precious water supplies by capturing stormwater and storing it for reuse.

• There are a surprising number of large (greater than 10 acres) parcels that could be effectively utilized.

Why is Polluted Runoff Such a Serious Problem?

In Los Angeles County, nearly 100 pollutants from daily runoff contaminate over 500 miles of rivers and streams, the San Pedro and Santa Monica bays, and the county's world-renowned beaches-and nearly all are in violation of the U.S. Clean Water Act, which sets water quality standards to protect public health. Water pollution from contaminated runoff plagues bays, ocean waters, beaches, lakes, rivers, and streams throughout California. Pollutants flow daily directly to these waters-without treatment of any kind-endangering human health, marine and aquatic life, and ocean waters worldwide. The dangerous impacts of this polluted water on human health, animals, and aquatic life have been well documented.

More than a century of growth and development has drastically changed the natural function of rivers and watersheds, and paved thousands of square miles with concrete and asphalt. These non-porous surfaces can't absorb or filter water the way soil and natural lands do. To make matters worse, our yards, landscaping, businesses, industry, streets and parking lots create "runoff"-pollutant-laden water that flows daily, even in dry weather, directly into drainage systems and to our rivers, beaches, bays, and ocean. All property in every community throughout L.A. County produces runoff, in dry weather generating a total of 330 million gallons of water every day-enough to fill the Rose Bowl four times over.

When it rains, the problem only gets worse. In an average rainfall year, over 150 billion gallons of stormwater flow through the county's drainage system, without treatment of any kind. Pollutants in L.A. County's stormwater and daily urban runoff include infection-causing bacteria, toxic metals, pesticides, household and industrial chemicals, trash, oil, oxygen-choking fertilizers, and other toxins. High bacteria counts cause serious illnesses and thousands of beach closures in L.A. County every year. Summer beach closures cost local cities millions of dollars in lost revenue, and these ongoing ocean and beach pollution problems hurt L.A. County's worldwide image as a desirable tourist destination.

Sixteen million tons of trash end up on L.A. County's beaches every year-and this does not count the additional millions of tons that are carried by ocean currents and which accumulate in huge floating "rafts" of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean between California and Japan. The largest of these is twice the size of Texas. Trash chokes one million seabirds worldwide every year; plastic is found in the stomachs of seabirds, turtles, and marine mammals around the worlds, and toxic pollutants and bacteria from runoff can be fatal to marine mammals.

Can Green Approaches Help Solve the Problem?

Many water quality experts believe that much of the toxins, bacteria, and other contaminants carried by daily urban and stormwater runoff could be permanently addressed by directing these polluted waters to a network of new and well-designed "green" areas: new and restored natural habitat, parks, and recreation lands that would allow soil and plants to naturally filter and uptake water and pollutants as well as providing a wide range of open space and other benefits. The Green Solution can be implemented in any area suffering from polluted runoff problems.

To be considered a Green Solution, projects must:

• Convert paved, impervious areas to pervious lands that allow water to filter into soil and plants

• Retrofit existing pervious areas to effectively catch, filter, clean, store, and reduce runoff

• Create multiple benefits, such as parks, recreation, habitat, and other open space opportunities.

CCI's Green Solution methodology is being applied in watersheds in Los Angeles County and in the San Francisco Bay Area. CCI is continuing to develop their unique Green Solution methodology, and is developing a prioritized ranking of suitable lands in the Santa Monica Bay Watershed by integrating additional data on water quantity, water quality, open space deficit, community demographics, and conservation needs.

The Community Conservancy International team includes state-of-the-art hydrology engineering and GIS digital mapping technology, provided by Psomas and GreenInfo Network. Geosyntec also participated. Funding has been provided by Community Conservancy International, State Coastal Conservancy, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, Santa Monica Bay Restoration Foundation, Trust for Public Land, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Association of Bay Area Governments, and the San Francisco Estuary Project.

This new and innovative Green Solution Project approach presents a practical way to move forward quickly to protect and improve water quality throughout Los Angeles County and to establish a network of green open space, park, recreation, and habitat lands. In addition, the Green Solution Project approach has ramifications throughout the United States. The Green Solution approach can be applied in any area that needs to address pressing water quality problems due to runoff and that wishes to emphasize the multiple benefits that can be achieved by Green Solution Projects through restoring and creating habitat, park, recreation, and other open space lands.