Citizens Energy Group’s Partnership for Excellence in Research and Learning (PERL) program is collaborating with Indiana University on projects focused on urban resilience and watershed modeling.
Since the early spring, Citizens has supported IU’s Green Infrastructure Working Group in its effort to develop greenspace mapping and resilience planning tools. Mapping tools are needed to assist cities in strategic planning and management of urban green infrastructure, so that the spatial distribution of vulnerabilities and threats (e.g., low income and flood risk) is well matched with appropriate forms of vegetation (e.g., rain gardens).
This initiative has brought together ecologists, social-ecological systems scientists, geographers, and informatics and computing scientists with community partners in municipal planning and development, such as Citizens, to identify ways that existing tools can be enhanced to address specific climate resilience planning needs of urban areas in Indianapolis and Bloomington.
The effort thus far has been facilitated through a series of charettes, executed with the assistance of professional design thinking consultants. Bruce Cooley, Project Manager, Capital Programs & Engineering, has served as one of Citizens’ representatives during the charettes.
“Together with Roger Hanas, Manager of Wastewater System Renewal, the charettes have been a great opportunity to plan toward a better future using data we already collect or could collect from publicly available sources. The Green Infrastructure Working Group has made great progress thus far; we look forward to using the tools the group develops.”
Another initiative on which Citizens and IU are collaborating is a watershed modeling project for Pleasant Run. Researchers are using their expertise on energy efficiency analyses to try to quantify energy and carbon emissions reductions associated with runoff reductions modeled from realistic scenarios of green infrastructure interventions in the watershed. The assumption is, the more that we can reduce the amount that is captured by the DigIndy Tunnel System, the more we can reduce the amount of energy the pump uses.
This project is in its early stages and is being co-led by researchers from IU and IUPUI.
