Learn how we care for and manage water, how we’re working to reduce flooding, and the ways we invest in Water Sensitive Urban Design to manage stormwater and improve our City.

Water is our most precious resource

We’re committed to smart and sustainable water resource management and conservation and invest in Smart Water Design each year, which includes Water Sensitive Urban Design projects, initiatives, and research.

We also contribute on an annual basis to the Brown Hill and Keswick Creeks Stormwater Management Plan, a long-term flood mitigation project covering the Brown Hill Creek catchment area that extends across multiple Council areas. In the 2023/24 financial year, we’ll contribute $540,000 towards this project.

Each year, we also work to reduce localised flooding by completing both major and minor stormwater upgrade projects each year. We’ll be investing over $4 million towards flooding projects in the 2023/24 budget; these projects are chosen based on a combination of stormwater management plans, community feedback, and risk assessments.

Read more about our water initiatives below.

Stormwater management

The way we manage stormwater is constantly changing with new techniques and greater impacts of climate change. We need to tackle stormwater strategically, and harvesting stormwater is one of the best ways to be more efficient with our usage.

Using Water Sensitive Urban Design, we’re irrigating our open spaces, verges, and tree canopy cover to:

• Reduce the urban heat island effect.
• Prevent floods.
• Lessen the pressure on our pit and pipe stormwater system.

In July 2020, our Engineering and Natural Environments Team won the Excellence in Sustainable and Environmentally Responsible Infrastructure Management award from Local Government Professionals Australia for our St Marys permeable asphalt car park.

Strategic research projects

We’re working with local universities to conduct strategic research projects to make our community event better and keeping our open spaces, street trees, and biodiversity green. By funding projects we are gaining insights into our environment which helps us change how we look after our open spaces. Current projects include:

Water Sensitive Urban Design

Most of our heat comes from streets and open spaces. To help cool and green our city, we use Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) elements. We can catch rain where it falls and use it in the local environment, reducing flooding and pollution problems downstream.

WSUD elements include:

Tree net inlets

Roadside trees can access stormwater within the kerb and water table. Tree net inlets catch low flow stormwater and give trees stable subsoil moisture levels. This means tree roots don’t have to search for water in dry seasons, reducing root damage to roads and kerbs.

Permeable pavements (road and footpath, block paved or asphalt)

Like tree inlets, permeable pavements boost subsoil moisture levels and reduce root damage to hard infrastructure. These pavements help to reduce flood risks by temporarily keeping stormwater in the aggregate layers underneath pavers.

Rain gardens

Rain gardens improve the water quality of road runoff, and when built at a large scale, help reduce flood risks. The aggregate layers and plants filter the stormwater and trap pollutants before they get to our natural waterways.

Soakage trenches

These help to reduce flood risks and the need for hard stormwater infrastructure by guiding water into reserves or road verges. The design helps trees thrive year-round by boosting subsoil moisture at deep levels. Soakage trenches also detain stormwater during floods when constructed at a large scale.

Learn more about water sensitive urban design

Fulton Place in Clarence Gardens

City of Mitcham has preserved and enhanced the health prospects of a significant tree at Fulton Place, Clarence Gardens, as part of a footpath renewal project.

The river red gum had blocked the footpath and lifted the kerb and road pavement, causing water to pool and flow into a resident’s driveway during heavy rain.

Residents were invited to comment on the concept design that set out to provide a continuous footpath connection, solve the drainage issue, protect the tree and enhance passive watering of trees, verge and island landscapes.

The residents’ feedback helped shape the final design, which incorporates permeable paving in the footpath and road.

The porous pavements allow passive stormwater irrigation to help support new landscaping including native plants and grass on the verge and cul-de-sac.

Pasadena Biodiversity Corridor

In February 2022, we transformed Grant Jacobs and Sierra Nevada Reserves into a biodiversity corridor. We used heat mapping tools to identify these reserves as the hottest in our city, transforming them from dry and dusty spaces to cool, green areas for our wildlife and community to enjoy.

Our design redirects stormwater from our underground pipe system and roads into a vegetated swale and a series of underground soakage trenches to water the plants and trees. We also upgraded a playground and walking trail with nature play elements in this green engineering project.

Skitch Reserve

To keep the reserve green and help the Crepe myrtles and ornamental pears flourish a stormwater harvesting system was installed in Skitch Reserve in Melrose Park. Approximately 60 metres of gravel filled trench soaks stormwater collected from Winston Avenue into the reserve’s subsoil to provide water for the trees.

Smart Water System in partnership with SA Water

We began an innovation trial in December 2020 to use smart metering in our parks and reserves. We partnered with SA Water to install smart meters, soil moisture probes and air temperature sensors at 15 of our most popular sites. This means we get real time data to help us become more efficient in irrigation.

If you want to visit a reserve, you can check the surface temperature beforehand using our interactive SA Water map.

Collaborative Water Sensitive Urban Design Research with Flinders University

Have you noticed some of our street trees wrapped in hessian behind tall guards?

We used grant funding from Green Adelaide to collaborate with Flinders University to see how well TreeNet inlets capture stormwater to irrigate our street trees, and how they cool their surroundings.

Water evaporates from tree leaves, making them like evaporative air conditioners that keep our suburbs cooler. Our trees help stormwater management by drawing stormwater from the TreeNets.

We use electrical resistivity tomography to see active sapwood in the tree’s trunks so we can attach sap flow metres. The sap flow metres show how much water trees take up on streets with TreeNet inlets, and compare them to those without TreeNet inlets.

These studies show how much our trees benefit from the extra water but also if the trees increase how much stormwater we can harvest.