Where there is a clean, controlled supply of water, biodiversity will flourish.

 

 

Blue Green Studio works across a range of sectors to enhance biodiversity and water quality, reduce flood risk, and bring lasting community benefits by fully integrating sustainable rainwater design within the landscape.

 

Once rainfall is recognised as the valuable resource that it really is, then we start to design with it, and not against it. Consequently, landscape and rainwater work together, as in natural landscapes, and multiple benefits can be realised. There is also an economic benefit to this integrated approach: truly multifunctional landscapes are naturally cost-effective, owing to an elevated provision of services. The opposite is also worth considering: if rainwater management is an after-thought, the result can be unnecessarily high capital costs, and a proliferation of features that each provide only a singular function. 

​

Blue and Green Infrastructure (BGI herein) are fundamental to sustainable design. Blue infrastructure and green infrastructure are each integrated networks, that can bring multifunctional benefits. An example of such multifunctional benefits would be the simultaneous provision of pollution removal, flood risk reduction, community wellbeing, air quality, and biodiversity benefits in a single raingarden. 

​

The benefits of BGI are amplified in the context of the climate and biodiversity emergencies, and increasingly, legislation reflects this. Embedding natural goods and services (ideally from the earliest stage of the project) through effective design can offset the potentially negative impact of development, and contribute significantly to important targets, such as catchment management, biodiversity and carbon targets.  

​

Grey infrastructure elements, used well, can enable high quality and robust blue and green infrastructure. For example, there is no better hard surface than permeable paving, in terms of pollution removal capacity, and it too can bring many multifunctional benefits. 

​

​

Blue Green Studio creates beautiful and multifunctional landscapes across many different sectors, offering design services from the earliest masterplanning stages, for full integration, to construction supervision and sign-off:

 

• Residential

• Industrial and Mixed-use Developments 

• Educational

• Urban Regeneration and Retrofit

• Natural Flood Management (NFM), Rural SuDS, River Restoration

• Wetland Design and Habitat Creation

​

​

Blue Green Studio has published design guidance on SuDS, wetlands and blue and green infrastructure. The most recent guidance is a design guide/code of practice on behalf of WWT for use by The Berkeley Group, to help develop high quality blue and green infrastructure in Berkeley developments, (low resolution) example pages below.

​

​