‘Sponge City’ to Solve Flooding Issues.
Flooding has become a major issue in any country. Not just island countries are a potential risk of flooding, but also land countries such as Australia. While there are 3 major factors that cause urban flooding: Climate change, Urbanization and inappropriate city plan and management (Nguyen, 2018). In Australia, flooding leads economic loss an estimated by $30 billion from 2010 to 2011. Needed, appropriate programs to tackle this issue because flooding risk creates a victim, economic and activities stuck. In response to flooding risk, many countries have been adopted the concept of "Sponge City" such as China, the United Kingdom and the USA. The aim of this concept are reducing, control flooding risk and collect the rainwater. However, Australia has been left behind to China that has improved "Sponge City" to 130 cities around China (Wang). Additionally, China as a one of "Sponge City" have significantly resulted in this concept. Moreover, China claimed that 70% of rainwater have reused. "Sponge City" approach which combines Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS), Blue Green Cities (BGS) and Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) (Chan, 2017). Perhaps, this method can reduce flooding and reuse rainwater which usually a core cause flood comes. In 21 century Australia adopted six development stage of urban water management which are: regional, district, local, subdivision application, development and post-development (Australia, 2008). although these techniques are still difficult to apply especially in the advancement stage, and they have just been connected in small scale. According to Thu Thuy Nguyen a ‘Sponge City' is the implementation of designer and builder having to mitigate the impact of construction on the environment including water, soil, vegetation, and biodiversity. Thus, sponge city idea is a pioneer recently concept to mitigate flooding disaster risk.
References
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Thank you for your introduction of sponge cities, which is a new term for me. I checked what sponge cities means to supplement. It shows it is a city that are designed to passively absorb, clean and use rainfall in an ecologically friendly way that reduces dangerous and polluted runoff. Associated techniques include permeable roads, rooftop gardens, rainwater harvesting, rain gardens, green space and blue space such as ponds and lakes. In fact, Australia and America's many cities have used the similar policies before, such as 'Rain garden' in Melbourne and Berkeley. It is one kind of green infrastructure that reduce run offs in cities to reduce effects of stormwater by building more greenspace, because the soil can absorb more runoffs.
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