Recognizing value: natural asset management

NRU
Aug. 31, 2016
By Leah Wong

Recognizing the value of its natural capital, such as forests, grasslands and wetlands, enables municipalities to understand how natural assets can support grey infrastructure to reduce the impacts of climate change.

An 18-month pilot project being conducted in the Town of Oakville and four other Canadian municipalities - three in B.C. and another Ontario municipality yet to be announced - seeks to create a municipal toolkit to guide the incorporation of natural capital into asset management plans.

“[Municipalities] need to look at how they actually [include] natural assets and manage natural assets in municipal plans,” Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation program director Shelley Petrie told NRU. “For grey infrastructure there are whole programs built for how municipalities do that. In the case of natural capital, nothing like that exists for municipalities.”

Oakville’s participation in the project was approved by council earlier this year and will be led by senior staff from finance, development engineering and environmental departments, as well as Conservation Halton.

“We need to record the value of these assets to be able to protect them for future generations,” Oakville mayor Rob Burton said in a press release. “The policies and practices we develop here with this innovative project will help other communities protect their natural heritage too.”

Oakville and most of the other pilot municipalities will focus on stormwater conveyance. Petrie noted that municipalities are experiencing the effects of climate change on their stormwater systems and how to prevent flooding continues to be a concern.

A project team, comprising Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, Sustainable Prosperity, David Suzuki Foundation, Town of Gibsons, B.C. and Brooke and Associates, is supporting the pilot project. It will help the municipalities identify their natural assets and calculate the economic value of these assets.

The municipalities will explore various scenarios to determine how these natural assets can help mitigate stormwater flows. These scenarios will then help to flesh out the associated capital and operating costs of using natural assets and to assess whether they would be more beneficial than an engineered option.

“[The pilot] will create some real municipal examples here in Canada, which we lack at this moment in time,” said Petrie. “We want to be able to have more examples and have municipal staff and councils that have experience [in natural asset management] and can help move the issue forward.”

The Town of Gibson, B.C., is a Canadian example of a municipality that has already adopted this approach for its infrastructure planning. Petrie said the town developed scenarios to decide whether to build a treatment plant for its water reservoir.

“When they went through the scenario they found that it would cost them less to invest in the environment to keep a high quality drinking water source than it was to build a treatment plant,” said Petrie

She predicts municipalities will see similar results with investments in natural assets as a way to manage stormwater. “Natural systems can be much more adept at being able to absorb the peak flows you get from extreme storms.”