Green Infrastructure

{
  "id": "MLC-T-ENV-012552",
  "term": "Green Infrastructure",
  "field": "Environment",
  "definition": "1. An adaptable term used to describe an array of products, technologies, and practices that use natural systems - or engineered systems that mimic natural processes - to enhance overall environmental quality and provide utility services. As a general principal, Green Infrastructure techniques use soils and vegetation to infiltrate, evapotranspirate, and/or recycle stormwater runoff.\n\n2. An adaptable term used to describe an array of products, technologies, and practices that use natural systems - or engineered systems that mimic natural processes - to enhance overall environmental quality and provide utility services. As a general principal, Green Infrastructure techniques use soils and vegetation to infiltrate, evapotranspirate, and/or recycle stormwater runoff. When used as components of a stormwater management system, Green Infrastructure practices such as green roofs, porous pavement, rain gardens, and vegetated swales can produce a variety of environmental benefits. In addition to effectively retaining and infiltrating rainfall, these technologies can simultaneously help filter air pollutants, reduce energy demands, mitigate urban heat islands, and sequester carbon while also providing communities with aesthetic and natural resource benefits.\n\n3. Encompasses many practices to protect, restore or mimic natural processes to reduce impact to communities from flooding or excessive heat and to improve air, soil, and water quality.\n\n4. The more common usage refers to vegetated landscapes that are conserved or restored for ecological or anthropological reasons, e.g., wildlife habitat, flood protection, drinking water source protection and air quality and urban heat island concerns.\n\n5. This term is also used to connote practices and strategies used to reduce the impact of wet weather events (rainfall and snow melt) on receiving waters. In this usage, green infrastructure is often also called low impact development or LID and is used to describe an array of strategies, products, technologies, and practices that are designed to mimic the behavior of natural systems as they relate to runoff, watershed and site hydrology and pollutant reduction. These systems are typically designed using an integrated design approach that relies on engineering, hydrological, biological, architectural, and planning concepts and practices to plan, design and manage runoff through plant and soil uptake, filtration, infiltration, evapotransipiration and the harvest and use of runoff.\n\n6. An interconnected framework of natural and/or engineered areas, structures, facilities, features or services providing environmentally friendly and sustainable benefits to people and communities.\n\n7. Using soil and vegetation to help slow the flow of runoff and manage rainwater where it falls. Examples include: rain gardens, green roofs and pervious pavement.\n\n8. A term that has two commonly used meanings. The more common usage refers to vegetated landscapes that are conserved or restored for ecological or anthropological reasons, e.g., wildlife habitat, flood protection, drinking water source protection and air quality and urban heat island concerns.",
  "subject": "Sustainability and green living",
  "references": [
    "Greening EPA Glossary",
    "Green Infrastructure Glossary",
    "Resilience and Adaptation in New England (RAINE) Glossary",
    "EPA Guidance for Federal Land Management in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Glossary at http://www.epa.gov/owow_keep/NPS/chesbay502/pdf/chesbay_glossary.pdf",
    "EPA Guidance for Federal Land Management in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Glossary at http://www.epa.gov/owow_keep/NPS/chesbay502/pdf/chesbay_glossary.pdf; Federal Land Management in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Glossary",
    "USDA National Agricultural Library Thesaurus",
    "Chesapeake Bay Program Glossary",
    "Federal Land Management in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Glossary"
  ],
  "url": "https://mlchart.com/terminology/environment/green-infrastructure/"
}