In 2014, China initiated its national action plan for sponge city development aiming to tackle urban water and environmental challenges. Since then, numerous projects have been implemented across 30 pilot cities and beyond in China through two development stages. The sponge city development, based on a systematic approach of “source reduction, process control, and systematic remediation”, adopts comprehensive technical measures of “infiltration, detention, retention, purification, utilization and discharge”, and coordinates the different aspects of water quantity and quality, ecology and safety, centralized and decentralized, green and grey, landscape and function, on-shore and off-shore, surface and underground, etc. It aims to control urban runoff effectively, to minimize the impacts of urban development and construction activities on the natural hydrological characteristics and ecological environment, and to enable the city’s resilience like a “sponge” to adapt to environmental changes and natural disasters. This assessment standard for sponge city effects published by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of P.R. China is an attempt to provide guidance on the assessment of the effects of sponge city development projects and the city development as a whole. The main technical contents of this standard include: 1) general provisions; 2) terms and symbols; 3) basic requirements; 4) assessment items and 5) assessment methods. The publication of the English version of the Chinese assessment standard aims to provide non-Chinese readers an insight into what objectives are to be achieved through sponge city development and how sponge city projects are evaluated in China.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Sponge Cities: Emerging Approaches, Challenges and Opportunities" that was published in Water

Building water-wise cities is a pressing need nowadays in both developed and developing countries. This is mainly due to the limitation of the available water resources and aging infrastructure to meet the needs of adapting to social and environmental changes and for urban liveability. This is the first book to provide comprehensive insights into theoretical, systematic, and engineering aspects of water-wise cities with a broad coverage of global issues. The book aims to (1) provide a theoretical framework of water-wise cities and associated sustainable water systems including key concepts and principles, (2) provide a brand-new thinking on the design and management of sustainable urban water systems of various scales towards a paradigm shift under the resource and environmental constraints, and (3) provide a technological perspective with successful case studies of technology selection, integration, and optimization on the “fit-for-purpose” basis.

This book features expert contributions on key sustainability aspects of urban water management in Chinese agglomerations. Both technical and institutional pathways to sustainable urban water management are developed on the basis of a broad, interdisciplinary problem analysis.

This book is developed from and includes the presentations of leading international experts and scholars in the 12-14 July, 2006 Wingspread Workshop. With urban waters as a focal point, this book will explore the links between urban water quality and hydrology, and the broader concepts of green cities and smart growth. It also addresses legal and social barriers to urban ecological sustainability and proposes practical ways to overcome those barriers. Cities of the Future features chapters containing visionary concepts on how to ensure that cities and their water resources become ecologically sustainable and are able to provide clean water for all beneficial uses. The book links North American and Worldwide experience and approaches. The book is primarily a professional reference aimed at a wide interdisciplinary audience, including universities, consultants, environmental advocacy groups and legal environmental professionals.

The uptake of ecosystem-based approaches for disaster risk reduction (DRR) is slow, however, despite some success stories. There are multiple reasons for this reluctance: ecosystem management is rarely considered as part of the portfolio of DRR solutions because the environmental and disaster management communities typically work independently from each other; its contribution to DRR is highly undervalued compared to engineered solutions and therefore not given appropriate budget allocations; and there are poor interactions between policymakers and researchers, leading to unclear and sometimes contradictory scientific information on the role of ecosystems for DRR. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of knowledge and practice in this multidisciplinary field of ecosystems management and DRR. The contributors, professionals from the science and disaster management communities around the world, represent state-of-the-art knowledge, practices, and perspectives on the topic.