The Green Values® Calculator compares the performance, costs, and benefits of Green Infrastructure to conventional stormwater practices.

About the Calculator

The Green Values® Stormwater Management Calculator is designed to help plan green infrastructure solutions to prevent flooding for single buildings or larger neighborhood and community scale efforts. The calculator is for planners, landscape architects, municipal staff and homeowners to explore value of green infrastructure.

Green Infrastructure Impacts on Real Estate Value

Green infrastructure for stormwater management is an important contributor to both climate mitigation and adaptation. However, various barriers have stood in the way of its full implementation, and it is rarely applied at scale. One of the most significant barriers to green infrastructure installation is a lack of understanding and reliable documentation of the benefits that it provides. Some types of co-benefits are well-understood, and existing tools, such as this one available to estimate these benefits. Most significantly, one potentially very important co-benefit of green infrastructure – its impact on property values – is under-researched, until now.

CNT has researched and found a clear link between green infrastructure and property values. This will help to allow municipalities, organizations, advocates and residents to go beyond small-scale applications of green infrastructure and make green infrastructure a central part of how communities become more resilient to climate change.

Single Sites

Calculate the impact and benefits of green infrastructure to prevent flooding for single residences to learn:

  • What combination of green infrastructure solutions will best prevent flooding for your building.
  • What green infrastructure is and does.
  • How the use of green infrastructure saves money.

Multiple Sites

Define multiple buildings to calculate how green infrastructure can solve flooding at a neighborhood-scale.

  • Understand the costs and benefits of using green infrastructure to mitigate the need for built water infrastructure, such as sewers and detention basins.
  • Assess cost and benefits of large-scale implementation of green infrastructure.

A Large Area

Estimate the impact green infrastructure can have to adress flooding over a large area like a county or township.

  • Assess cost and benefits of large-scale implementation of green infrastructure.

Our Focus on Green Infrastructure

Green infrastructure is a critical part of a sustainable city and
region for a number of reasons:

Green Infrastructure Saves Money

  • Green infrastructure performs many of the same services as gray infrastructure, such as stormwater management, flood control and water quality, but often at a reduced cost and more reliably.
  • Cost savings is critically important, as the USEPA, General Accounting Office and American Society of Civil Engineers agree that the nation needs to spend between $300 billion and $1 trillion to fund drinking and wastewater needs over next 20 years.

Green Infrastructure Supports Sustainability

  • Wetlands, parks and other types of open spaces are a critical component of the sustainability of a region. Just try to imagine a neighborhood or community without a park or trees. Hard to do, isn’t it? And yet park districts and forestry and natural resources divisions face a constant struggle to obtain the necessary resources to fund these spaces.
  • If treated as infrastructure, however, open spaces and recreational areas could be treated as an investment, not an expense.

Green Infrastructure Better Uses Limited Resources

  • Governments not only spend less to install and maintain most green infrastructure, green infrastructure provides a host of ancillary benefits, such as increased recreation and open space, community building opportunities and better air and water quality.