Urbanization and climate change impacts on surface water quality: Enhancing the resilience by reducing impervious surfaces

Climate change and urbanization are key factors affecting the future of water quality in urbanized catchments. The work reported in this paper is an evaluation of the combined and relative impact of climate change and urbanization on the water quality of receiving water bodies in the context of a highly urbanized watershed served by a combined sewer system (CSS) in northern Italy. The impact is determined by an integrated modelling study involving two years of field campaigns. The results obtained from the case study show that impervious urban surfaces and rainfall intensity are significant predictors of combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and consequently of the water quality of the receiving water body. Scenarios for the year 2100 demonstrate that climate change combined with increasing urbanization is likely to lead to severe worsening of river water quality due to a doubling of the total phosphorus load from CSOs compared to the current load. Reduction in imperviousness was found to be a suitable strategy to adapt to these scenarios by limiting the construction of new impervious areas and decreasing the existing areas by only 15%. This information can be further utilized to develop future designs, which in turn should make these systems more resilient to future changes in climate and urbanization.