Every Drop Counts
Every Drop Counts in Healthy Green Spaces
Healthy green landscapes—parks, sports fields, home lawns, gardens, and urban forests—perform essential environmental functions like mitigating urban heat, slowing stormwater, sequestering carbon, producing oxygen, preventing soil erosion, and filtering pollutants from the atmosphere and water ways.
Water conservation and the maintenance of healthy green landscapes may be perceived as conflicting goals. However–when managed properly–healthy green landscapes make significant contributions to the environment while using water efficiently.
The key to these contributions is balance. Balancing efficient water use and healthy green landscape management helps to sustain these vital green spaces and conserves water resources.
The Importance of Healthy Green Landscapes
Healthy green landscapes are critical to the built environment because they provide numerous ecological, social, and economic benefits. And while legitimate concerns about excessive water use in landscape management persist, well-maintained landscapes actually contribute to urban resilience and climate regulation which helps to conserve water. Some key environmental benefits provided by healthy green landscapes include:
- Mitigating Urban Heat Islands: Vegetation reduces the urban heat island effect by providing shade and facilitating evapotranspiration from plants, leading to cooler urban environments (Shashua-Bar et al., 2009).
- Stormwater Management: Landscapes absorb and filter rain and stormwater, preventing excessive runoff and reducing flood risks (Connelan, 2016; Quian & Follett, 2010).
- Carbon Sequestration and Oxygen Production: Healthy green spaces capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce oxygen during the process of photosynthesis. This process improves air quality and mitigates climate change (Lal, 2012; Nowak & Crane, 2002; Zirkle et al., 2012).
- Preventing Soil Erosion: The vegetation in healthy green landscapes stabilizes soil, prevents erosion, and reduces sedimentation in waterways (Braun et al., 2024; Zirkle et al., 2012).
- Water Biofiltration: Plants filter pollutants from rain and stormwater, improving overall water quality (Dietz, 2007). These pollutants are then broken down by soil microbes before they can reach water sources.
Therefore, maintaining healthy green landscapes should not be considered a luxury, but rather a requirement for environmental sustainability and urban resilience.
Water Conservation Strategies for Healthy Green Landscapes
Balance between water conservation and healthy green landscape function may be achieved by implementing landscape best management practices that focus on the efficient use of water.
- Planning and Design
A healthy green landscape should meet the functional needs of those who will use and maintain it while also considering the site’s existing environmental conditions.
- Develop a Plan. A simple drawing of the area to be planted should include property lines, hardscapes, existing buildings and structures, trees and shrubs, utilities, and other potential limitations to the landscape design (Sun et al., 2012).
