Maintaining living infrastructure Green Deficit

NRU
June 8, 2016
Leah Wong

While all three levels of government are working to address the grey infrastructure deficit in the Greater Toronto Area, experts say attention also needs to be directed towards the region’s green infrastructure deficit.

“We need grey and we need green [infrastructure],” Ontario Parks Association executive director Paul Ronan told participants of the Grey to Green conference in Toronto last week. “To think that either one of them can work separately is really wrong.”

Ronan said that engineers are starting to see the positive relationship between grey and green infrastructure. He noted that green infrastructure can protect grey infrastructure and increase its lifespan. For example, an asphalt road on a treelined street will likely remain in good shape for 25 years, while the same street without trees would need to be replaced every 10 to 15 years.

While the benefits of green infrastructure are known- improving residents’ health and the environmental and economic well-being of the region-panelists agreed that highlighting them is critical if the three levels of government are to make green infrastructure a priority.

“We need to continue to communicate awareness of the environmental, economic, lifestyle, health, therapeutic, educational, spiritual and other life-enhancing benefits of greenspace and green infrastructure,” Landscape Ontario executive director Tony Di Giovanni.

Di Giovanni said that one of the biggest challenges in gaining recognition for the importance of green infrastructure is that there is no consistent definition of green infrastructure.

“Green infrastructure is defined as natural vegetation and vegetative technologies that collectively provide society with a broad array of products and services for healthy living,” said Di Giovanni. Th is definition, used by the Green Infrastructure Ontario Coalition, includes urban forests, meadows, green roofs, parks and bioswales, as well as technologies such as porous paving, cisterns and rain barrels. But it doesn’t include transit, which the federal government appears to deem green infrastructure.

Understanding what is considered green infrastructure is an important part of tracking green assets across the region.

LEAF founder and executive director Janet McKay told participants that municipal agencies are just starting to track their green infrastructure assets. This is important to understanding the extent of the green infrastructure deficit.

“If you’re a municipality and you have a fleet of trucks but you don’t know how many you have, what kind they are, what kind of shape they’re in, you don’t know when they were fueled or serviced last, you’re in a bad position,” said McKay. “And that’s where we are with green infrastructure.”

But it is not enough to just have policies that protect green infrastructure, McKay said. These policies must also be enforced in a way that ensures the quality of green infrastructure.

“We might, on paper, have really good policies that say ‘if you’re removing a tree for development purposes, you have to plant three.’ But it doesn’t add up,” said McKay. “It’s very difficult to enforce that those trees are going to be the right tree, in the right place or a species that is appropriate and will survive drought, pests and other urban stresses.”

This is also important when thinking about the location of greenspaces. Ronan said the lack of park space across the region is reflected in the use of conservation authority parking lots on the weekends-the demand to use these greenspaces is so high the lots are often jammed. And no one seems to be looking at the big picture.

“What has been happening is that as development occurs we get enough parkland for whoever’s area it is in-whether it’s a municipal area, specific city or region,” said Ronan. “What we’re not looking at is the overall picture of where the best place is to have that parkland available to people.”

This has also led to a disproportionate distribution of green infrastructure across the GTA, with new spaces being added in areas that are attracting more development. McKay noted that there is a lower portion of greenspace and urban forests in lower income neighbourhoods across the region.

“These are sometimes neighbourhoods where it is most difficult to establish and maintain trees in but they’re the areas that need them the most,” said McKay. “These [areas] are hot … and the people that live in these neighbourhoods deserve the health benefits that the urban forest can provide.”