Stormwater and Flood Risk Management

Healthy ecosystems play a vital role in the management and resiliency of our streams, rivers, bayous and coastlines. Thriving riverine and wetland ecosystems drive habitat for fish and wildlife, feed the drinking water sources for millions of people, provide sustainable flood protection, provide natural water quality treatment and support local economies. At WSP, we employ global expertise in stream restoration, tidal and non-tidal wetland creation, hydraulic engineering and river mechanics, riverine ecology, wetland and freshwater ecology and botany, biology, invasive species management, freshwater and marine sciences engineering, and geomorphology.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) leverage natural processes to provide environmental, social, and economic benefits – such as protecting coastlines while enhancing biodiversity. When we work to protect communities from flooding, there is an opportunity to look at it through a broader lens of how we can work with nature. We can adapt and modify traditional solutions by replacing hard infrastructure with green infrastructure that offers ecological and societal co-benefits and helps combat flooding, erosion, extreme temperatures, and restores biodiversity.

With increasing uncertainties and changing climates, flood protection through carefully planned, designed and operated hydraulic structures play a critical role in saving lives and protecting properties and communities. WSP provides design, inspection and maintenance of new and upgraded facilities such as dams, levees, reservoirs and pumping stations. We bring flood experts across the wide range of technical specialties required for these projects, including structural, geotechnical, electrical, mechanical and tunneling.

Perceiving the relationships between our watersheds, rainfall and the resultant runoff is a key step in understanding flood risks and performance along our waterways. Beyond simply tabulating flood flow rates, it is even more important that we understand the magnitude of uncertainty associated with our estimates. Using advanced hydrologic and hydraulic modeling, WSP is pioneering approaches to considering the interactions between rainfall and runoff and integrating uncertainty into our analysis and decision-making processes, offering industry leading capabilities including rigorous computation fluid dynamics studies of three-dimensional flow fields.