全球变化知识资源中心

Green Infrastructure (GI) is considered to be an innovative stormwater management approach that offers numerous other environmental benefits including reduction in air pollution and climate change mitigation compared with conventional gray infrastructures, and it has been gradually accepted and used worldwide. This review mainly focuses on the hydrological aspect of GI and provides a summary of the knowledge about GI as a stormwater management alternative. In this review, we discuss the operating mechanisms of a few widely-used GIs in the aspect of stormwater management. We critically examine policies for promoting GI implementation in some countries, including the sponge city in China and water sensitive urban design (WSUD) in Australia, and review the effectiveness of GI on treating stormwater quantity in real world applications. In addition, we also used Bibliometrics to analyze the GI research trends and found GI has been popular in an increasing number of countries and regions, which China has the greatest future growth potential in GIs research. Moreover, many barriers impeding the further development of GI and strategies to overcome these barriers are also summarized. This review gathers knowledge from many sources to provide an overview of GI to better understand its mechanisms and applications, and to highlight the areas that require future study.