Life cycle assessment of green–grey coastal flood protection infrastructure: a case study from New Orleans

The study compared the life cycle environmental impacts of three coastal flood management strategies: grey infrastructure (levee), green-grey infrastructure (levee and oyster reef), and a do-nothing scenario, considering the flood damage of a single flooding event in the absence of protection infrastructure. A case study was adopted from a New Orleans, Louisiana residential area to facilitate the comparison. Hazus software, design guidelines, reports, existing projects, and literature were utilized as foreground data for modeling materials. A process-based Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach was used to assess environmental impacts. The life cycle environmental impacts included global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication, smog formation, resource depletion, ecotoxicity, and various human health effects. The Ecoinvent database was used for the selected life cycle unit processes. The mean results show green-grey infrastructure as the most promising strategy across most impact categories, reducing 47% of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to the do-nothing strategy. Compared to grey infrastructure, green-grey infrastructure mitigates 13% to 15% of the environmental impacts while providing equivalent flood protection. A flooding event with a 100-year recurrence interval in the study area is estimated at 34 million kg of CO2 equivalent per kilometer of shoreline, while grey and green-grey infrastructure mitigating such flooding is estimated to be 21 and 18 million kg, respectively. This study reinforced that coastal flooding environmental impacts are primarily caused by rebuilding damaged houses, especially concrete and structural timber replacement, accounting for 90% of GHG emissions, with only 10% associated with flood debris waste treatment. The asphalt cover of the levee was identified as the primary contributor to environmental impacts in grey infrastructure, accounting for over 75% of GHG emissions during construction. We found that there is an important interplay between grey and green infrastructure and optimizing their designs can offer solutions to sustainable coastal flood protection.