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Publication Date

7-17-2025

Municipalities are increasingly adopting green infrastructure (GI) as a nature-based solution to address stormwater management, climate adaptation, and other urban environmental challenges. One of the strengths of GI is its multifunctionality, which can provide a range of social, economic and environmental benefits. For GI to reach its full potential, widespread implementation throughout a landscape is needed. As a result, GI strategies often rely on various actors, including residents, who can implement GI on their own properties and contribute to the scaling up of GI across a landscape. GI implementation that depends on residents, however, has many challenges pertaining to their limited knowledge and perceived barriers to installation. To understand how residential GI programs communicate with residents about the benefits of installing GI, we analyzed the content of 25 government and non-governmental residential GI programs’ websites in the Greater Toronto Area (Ontario, Canada). We examined how programs are defining GI, use of related terms, specific types of GI covered by each program, and the identified benefits of GI. The results indicate that there are a variety of terms and definitions used to describe GI across the programs. Municipal programs most commonly identify GI providing regulating ecosystem services, while non-municipal programs most frequently identified cultural ecosystem services. There were also differences between terminology and ecosystem services communicated between programs that have an education focus versus those directly supporting GI installation. While a variety of GI features and ecosystem services are incorporated across the 25 programs, the narrower subset of information on each individual program’s websites makes it challenging for residents to consider different GI options based on their needs and desired benefits. Municipalities and educational initiatives could address this fragmentation, listing all GI installation programs so that residents can more easily compare options and GI types that can provide specific benefits. Future research should examine if municipal programs that currently highlight regulating ecosystem services would be more appealing if they also emphasized potential cultural ecosystem services.

DOI

10.15365/cate.2025.180204

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