Grant Highlight: Storm to Shade Helps Tucson’s Climate Resilience
In the Colorado River Basin, Planet Women donors have funded work on both sides of the border—from habitat restoration in Mexico to nature-based solutions to water conservation in the United States. In Arizona, Planet Women provided a technical assistance grant through Growing Water Smart, a program run by our longtime partner, Sonoran Institute, and Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. The Growing Water Smart program brings together diverse stakeholders to ensure water resources meet the demands of both people and nature, supporting healthy watersheds and prosperous communities across the Colorado River Basin.
Pictured: Blue Baldwin, GSI Program Manager. © Storm to Shade, Tucson.
Planet Women’s 2021 grant supported Blue Baldwin, the program manager for green stormwater infrastructure at the City of Tucson’s Water Department. Through a pilot program, Storm to Shade (S2S), Blue and her team have been implementing creative solutions that promote water conservation, improve soil health and reduce flooding in the face of severe climate impacts in Tucson.
We caught up with Blue Baldwin to discuss green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), lessons learned from the pilot GSI program, and Blue’s personal connection to the Sonoran Desert and sustainability work.
What is Green Stormwater Infrastructure?
In Tucson’s hot and dry climate, stormwater is considered a valuable water resource that can be managed to provide benefits to both the natural environment and the community, in accordance with Tucson Water’s One Water philosophy. The Storm to Shade (S2S) program builds and maintains GSI on public property throughout the city that makes use of stormwater runoff as the primary irrigation resource to support native vegetation. Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) refers to practices that mimic natural systems (or engineered systems that mimic or use natural processes) to capture, clean, and infiltrate stormwater; shade and cool surfaces and buildings; reduce flooding, create wildlife habitat; and provide other services that improve environmental health and communities’ quality of life.
“At its core, GSI invites us to work in partnership with nature to create more nature. This is something very intuitive for me. Despite the calculations and conversions required to size a basin or a cistern appropriately for a specific catchment area, the simple fact that water flows downhill and the understanding that this work is, ultimately, about giving nature a helping hand to go ahead and do her thing has always felt innate and therefore, empowering.”
Pictured: Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) explainer. © Storm to Shade, Tucson.
Tell us about the project you proposed in 2021, what did you hope to learn?
In spring of 2021, the recently launched Storm to Shade Program (S2S) encountered its very first opportunity to build a new GSI project in a City park undergoing multiple improvements. The S2S team recognized that by capturing stormwater flows from an adjacent street and directing those flows to vegetated basins inside the park, dozens of trees and shrubs could be added to provide shade, cooling, habitat, and a beautiful new park amenity, all supported by stormwater. In addition, a large swath of unsightly and underutilized turf would be replaced by drought tolerant, native Sonoran Desert plants. Win-win-win!
As a new program in the City of Tucson, the S2S team was highly motivated to demonstrate as many best practices as possible in our first GSI project. With help from a partner, WEST Consultants, the S2S team had been learning about the crucial role healthy soil plays in successful landscapes as well as soil’s capacity to sequester carbon. Given the growing body of data demonstrating the myriad benefits of microbially rich, healthy soil, we had good reason to suspect adding biological soil amendments (BSAs) would result in more robust shrubs and trees, nicer turf, fewer weeds, and decreased irrigation needs. We were eager to try it, but weren’t able to fund the work due to constraints around how S2S funds can be used, and the Parks Department budget was already overstretched. The Technical Assistance grant from the Planet Women and the Sonoran Institute provided the external funding needed to hire WEST to add BSAs to the GSI project area.
What did you really learn? What impact did the project have on the community, on the City of Tucson, on you personally?
BIG lesson #1: Communication and coordination is everything. S2S’s BSA project was just one small piece of a multimillion-dollar park improvement project that involved multiple City departments and staff and numerous design consultants and construction contractors, each of whom had their own timelines, budgets, goals, priorities, and cultures. Bringing all partners onto the same page proved extremely challenging and ultimately resulted in some activity that compromised the integrity of the BSA project implementation.
Despite implementation challenges, S2S and WEST were able to work with Parks Department leadership to gain buy-in and support for the BSA investigation, which was unprecedented and opened the door for continued conversations and investigations into the role BSAs and soil health play in GSI and Tucson’s parks.
With support from a soil scientist colleague from the University of Arizona, S2S was able to facilitate a collaboration with a nearby high school biology class to conduct hands-on investigations into soil and decomposition in the new GSI area of the park. The opportunity to work directly with a soil scientist and carry out a scientific experiment in the field was a unique and exciting experience for the students and their teacher.
An important lesson for next time is that sometimes enthusiasm tempts you to bite off more than you can chew. Aim smaller to start. Had we narrowed the scope and size of the project, we could have maintained more control over external factors to ensure that the BSA project was executed as planned and demonstrated success.
Pictured: Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) team members (left to right): Brooke Bushman, maintenance program coordinator; Blue Baldwin, GSI program coordinator; and Xochitl Coronado-Vargas, public outreach coordinator. © Storm to Shade, Tucson.
You have extensive knowledge in permaculture, rainwater harvesting, and native Sonoran Desert plants, among other sustainability areas. Can you share a bit about your background?
When I was little, I spent hours playing in the wash near my house, dragging a magnet through the sand to collect iron; searching for tiny sand rubies; sitting still and silent to watch families of Gambel’s quail go about their daily business; learning the smells of desert plants by smooshing their leaves between my fingers or scratching their bark with my nails. I felt I knew the desert in an intimate way.
As I grew into a young adult, I didn’t realize there was value in this knowledge. I turned my attention to human health during my undergraduate years at Colorado College and went on to. complete a master’s in public health at the University of Arizona. I stumbled into a little pocket-cash job at a natural building materials showroom. There, I met the community of people who would become my future mentors, employers, and colleagues—natural builders, permaculture practitioners, rainwater harvesters. I had found my people and my passion in “sustainability.” Over the years, I’ve worked for progressive environmental nonprofits and managed a school’s state-of-the-art garden and ecology programs. Most recently, I’ve focused on urban greening projects as the City of Tucson’s GSI Program Manager.
Where can people learn more?
Blog post on Sonoran Institute’s website