<\/p>\n
Like anything else,<\/span> water is great in moderation\u2014urbanites need it to survive, but downpours can flood streets and homes. And as you might have noticed, climate change isn\u2019t good at moderation. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, supercharging storms to dump more water quicker, which can overwhelm municipal sewer systems built for the climate of long ago. Thus you get the biblical flooding that\u2019s been drowning cities around the world, from Zhengzhou, China, to Seoul, South Korea, to Cologne, Germany, to New York City.<\/p>\n In response, urban planners are increasingly thinking of cities less as rain jackets\u2014designed to whisk water away as fast as possible before it has a chance to accumulate\u2014and more as sponges. By deploying thirsty green spaces and digging huge dirt bowls where water can gather and percolate into underlying aquifers, \u201csponge cities\u201d are making rain an asset to be exploited instead of expelled.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhere once there were forests and fields and wetlands that would soak up the rain, these have been paved over and replaced with surfaces that do not absorb rain,\u201d says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Those are hard materials like concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, and roofs, which funnel runoff into gutters, storm drains, and sewers.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe denser cities are developed, the more impervious surfaces are used, the worse the impacts of climate change are becoming,\u201d Kiparsky continues. \u201cOnce the capacity of these structures is exceeded, then water starts backing up, and its problems are exacerbated because of the lack of the natural absorbency of large areas of soil and vegetation.\u201d<\/p>\n Any good city planner knows the value of green spaces, but traditionally these have been used mainly for public enjoyment. Sponge city designers also use them as a tool for managing increasingly furious rainstorms. An inch of rain dumped over the course of an hour is more likely to overwhelm stormwater infrastructure than the same inch of water falling over 24 hours\u2014a problem for places like in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where storms have gotten significantly wetter over the past half century. \u201cThe long and short of it is: more intense and more frequent,\u201d says Tony Igwe, senior group manager of stormwater at the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, which is sponge-ifying the city. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of work going on not just in Pittsburgh, but especially in the mid-Atlantic, to really look at those numbers in the next few years.\u201d<\/p>\n Installing permeable concrete in Pittsburgh<\/p>\n <\/span>Courtesy of Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like anything else, water is great in moderation\u2014urbanites need it to survive, but downpours can flood streets and homes. And as you might have noticed, climate change isn\u2019t good at moderation. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, supercharging storms to dump more water quicker, which can overwhelm municipal sewer systems built for the climate of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1226503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1226503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1226503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1226503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1226503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1226503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}