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ASSESSING BENEFITS AND COSTS

Natural infrastructure (NI) provides communities with a broad array of economic, environmental and social benefits. Improved approaches are needed to evaluate, quantify and forecast these benefits to support planning and decision making

Understanding AGENCY DECISION MAKING

When making decisions about the types of infrastructure to use for a project, agencies have processes they use to evaluate costs and benefits in order to find the best-suited form of infrastructure for their needs. This project will create a database of the existing processes agencies use to make decisions about major infrastructure projects to better understand how these decisions are made.

Maximizing nATURAL INFRASTRUCTURE benefits

Natural infrastructure is thought to provide “win-win” outcomes for both  communities and ecosystems. This project seeks to confirm those win-win relationships, and will incorporate them into a tool at the scale of a large watershed, which will provide a multi-criteria decision analysis framework so that project managers can use it to aid in decision making.

Characterizing NATURAL INFRASTRUCTURE projects

It is difficult to properly value the benefits of natural infrastructure, which makes it hard to assess the true value of implementing it during project planning. This project examines the existing ways that entities evaluate the benefits of NI during project planning.