Learning from Natural Assets

The City of Mississauga is currently undertaking The Climate Change Project, developing the first ever comprehensive Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP), which aims to address the realities of climate change in Mississauga. Over recent years there has been a growing recognition of the impact climate change could have on the city. We can now point to first-hand experiences of extreme weather locally—from the ice storm in 2013 to floods in July of the same year and as recently as February 2018. Mississauga, like many other municipalities around the world, has identified the need to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and position the city competitively in the transition to a low-carbon economy while working to increase the city’s resilience and capacity to deal with and respond to the physical, social, and ecological effects of a changing climate.

Recognizing that many citizens, organizations, and businesses have major stakes in local climate action, a crucial first step in this process has been to establish a stakeholder panel to serve as a platform to consult with stakeholders in the community. Key partners in this process are Mississauga’s Conservation Authorities.

Conservation Authorities are local watershed management agencies that deliver services and programs to protect and manage impacts on water and other natural resources. While independent organizations, Conservation Authorities work in close partnership with all levels of government, landowners, and many other organizations to ensure Ontario’s water, land, and natural habitats are conserved, restored, and responsibly managed through watershed-based programming.11For more on conservation authorities and the history of Credit Valley Conservation, see Andrea Olive’s profile of the CVC in this broadsheet, p. 24 Further discussion of conservation authorities is available via Conservation Ontario “About Conservation Authorities” http://conservationontario.ca/conservation-authorities/ about-conservation-authorities/

Flooding is a very real concern in the City of Mississauga. In August 2009, July 2013, summer of 2017, and as recently as February 2018, Mississauga residents experienced flooding events. In light of this, and the expectation that we are likely to see an increase in the intensity and frequency of heavy rain events, flooding is a significant focus within the City and the Climate Change Project in particular. Working collaboratively with Conservation Authorities on this issue is an important part of how we are responding to climate change impacts in the City.

One of the ways the City is working with Conservation Authorities to combat climate change, and flood risk in particular, is to challenge the traditional line between infrastructure and the environment. Adapting to climate change from a flooding perspective is largely about managing increasing volumes of water, and the speed with which those volumes present. Both infrastructure and natural systems have built-in mechanisms to deal with excess water. They both give us a better understanding of how to cope with large, and sometimes sudden, amounts of water. Armed with this knowledge we can then build infrastructure that uses characteristics from nature to inform infrastructure—and vice versa—to lessen the effects of flooding.

The following are two examples that illustrate how the City is working with Conservation Authorities to better integrate and understand the value of natural systems that help mitigate flood risk.

In Ontario, intensification is the primary scheme for development, which consists of building in areas of existing development, as opposed to building where no development exists. This is especially true in Mississauga, which is largely built out. Traditional intensification also results in an increase in hard surfaces, which cannot absorb excess amounts of water. The result is what we call urban runoff; that is, the surface runoff of rainwater. Conservation Authorities have been leading the way on the research, development, and implementation of low-impact development (LID). LID involves a set of site design strategies, infrastructure choices, and distributed small-scale practices that minimize runoff and mimics the way nature deals with stormwater.22Credit Valley Conversation, “Low Impact Development,” https://cvc.ca/low-impact-development. This includes permeable paving, green roofs, and rain gardens, which all help to capture, filter, and slow the flow of rainwater instead of runoff quickly overwhelming sewers and other stormwater infrastructure. By mimicking the flood-management services that nature provides within the context an increasingly urbanized community, we can build much more resilient systems that reduce flood risk and provide resiliency during extreme rain events.

Constructing infrastructure is traditionally the first choice of cities and conservation authorities to reduce flooding. Natural areas, also known as natural assets, can often provide the same flood reduction services as infrastructure, which is why we need to find a way to quantify the benefit of these services in order to understand the role they can play in flood-mitigation strategies. A natural asset is defined as the stock of natural resources or ecosystems that are relied upon, managed, or could be managed by a municipality, regional district, or other form of local government for the sustainable provision of one or more municipal services.33Municipal Natural Assets Initiative, “Making Nature Count: Defining and Scoping Municipal Natural As- sets,” 15 March 2017, https://www.assetmanagementbc.ca/wp-content/uploads/ definingscopingmunicipalnaturalcapital-final-15mar2017.pdf. Credit Valley Conservation (CVC) currently has a pilot project to investigate the value of natural assets by assessing the services they provide. This complex process will assign a monetary value to natural assets, which can then be used by municipalities to assess the potential for using them in place of hard infrastructure to provide the same services.

Through this project, CVC is working with the City to determine the cost of the infrastructure that would be needed to replace the services from existing natural areas and assign a value to those services. By assigning this monetary value to natural assets, municipalities can better manage them, making business cases for their maintenance and future enhancement. It also allows cities to assess other opportunities to use naturalization, rather than build new infrastructure. This would allow natural assets to be considered in conversations and processes that traditionally were exclusively about engineering and infrastructure.

Both low-impact development and the valuation of existing natural areas blur the line between traditional approaches to nature and infrastructure. They consider nature alongside infrastructure and engineering, rather than separate from it. The environment has a built-in capacity to cope with flooding and water, so instead of just relying exclusively on hard infrastructure we need to find ways to integrate infrastructure and the environment. By understanding, mimicking, and valuing these natural assets, we will be in a much better position to create a resilient, low-carbon community.

If you want to learn more about the themes of the Climate Change Project, provide input, or get involved, visit us at www.mississaugamoves.ca.