Dynamically priced stormwater discharge fees in urban drainage areas

In growing urban environments impacted by climate change, conventional stormwater management practices reach their capacities. Low impact development solutions reduce runoff and mitigate further impacts of urbanization on the hydrologic cycle. The widespread implementation of these decentralized solutions requires a change to the current, centralized approach to stormwater management practiced by municipalities. This project investigates the suitability of a market-based approach enabled by distributed ledger technology. A dynamically priced discharge fee is proposed to serve stormwater network operators to incentivize participants to manage their properties according to the operators’ priorities. Long-term and event-based scenarios were evaluated for a catchment area in Toronto, Canada using the SWMM5 engine and the python wrapper pySWMM. It is shown that the dynamically priced discharge fee is a great tool to optimize local stormwater management. Global effects are mainly driven by the incentive for property owners to implement storage capacities.