A growing number of local governments are recognizing that nature is an important ally for the delivery of essential services. Cities and towns want to maintain the flow of services that nature provides, like flood mitigation, improved air and water quality, and biodiversity. Practically, this means they need to figure out which natural assets are critical to providing these services and need to be protected, which ones are degraded and need to be restored, and which ones just need general monitoring and maintenance to ensure they continue to stay healthy and functional.
The Regional District of Nanaimo (RDN) is on a path to figuring this out as they scope their first natural asset management plan. And, while every organization—local government or otherwise—has its unique context, goals, priorities, challenges, and natural assets, their journey may help others. This is especially true given how far the RDN has moved in terms of natural asset management maturity.
The RDN is located on the central east coast of Vancouver Island, covering an area of approximately 208,000 hectares in the Georgia Strait-Puget Sound Basin, within the traditional territories of several First Nations. The Regional District comprises the municipalities of Nanaimo, Lantzville, Parksville, and Qualicum Beach, and seven unincorporated electoral areas.
Like many organizations, several factors drove the RDN to advance natural asset management, including:
- Climate change impacts
- Water-related objectives, including drinking water supply resilience and protection, flood mitigation and resilience, and rainwater management.
- A need for land management insights to inform parks acquisitions
- Planning objectives, including ensuring growth and urban form are underpinned by an understanding of the services of nature
These drivers led the RDN to develop a desktop inventory of natural assets, completed in December 2022 with NAI. Natural asset inventories provide details on the types of natural assets a local government relies upon, their condition, and the risks they face, and are now underpinned by a National Standard. Natural asset inventories are generally understood to be a foundational step in integrating natural assets into asset management processes so they can be accounted for and managed like other infrastructure assets. The inventory project categorized a total of 21,964 individual assets, covering 297,966 hectares.
Moving Beyond the Inventory
Once the RDN established their inventory, they chose to then develop a natural asset management roadmap, with support from NAI and funding from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. The roadmap helped RDN staff develop a consensus around the short- to medium-term actions they should take next. Roadmaps can be completed before or after inventories; the RDN’s experience suggests there is much to be gained from the latter.
“Roadmaps are a low-barrier, cost-effective way for local governments to start their work in NAM—many that complete the Roadmap Program do so before they have a natural asset inventory,” explains Donna Chiarelli, NAI’s Director of Programs and Capacity Building.
“But for local governments that do already have inventories, like the RDN, we’re learning that a roadmap can help them fine-tune their next steps. Inventories shed light on the state of natural infrastructure, and we can use them to inform priority actions they can take to manage services and risks for their specific community.”
Understanding Natural Asset Risks and Services
In their 2022 inventory, the RDN identified a next step to define key natural asset services and risks to manage. The breakdown of risks to natural assets showed:
- 0 very high risks to natural assets
- 4 high risks to natural assets (fire; heat event; wind event; and insect infestation, plant disease, and invasive species)
- 3 moderate risks to natural assets (river, lake, and stream flooding; drought; and development/land conversion)
- 3 low risks to natural assets (coastal flooding, dam failure, and saltwater intrusion)
- 4 very low risks to natural assets (non-point source contaminants; air quality; tsunami, and overland flooding).
This risk identification was broad, mapping the spatial extent of each risk for natural assets as an asset class, with most risks identified at a regional level.
In 2024, the RDN embarked on a deeper dive to estimate the criticality of natural assets by type (and location, where possible) in terms of their significance to its operations or objectives.
The RDN delivers services common to both the electoral areas and member municipalities such as sewage treatment, regional recreation, regional parks, solid waste disposal, and transit. The RDN also provides local services such as community planning, watershed protection, community recreation, community parks, and utilities to electoral areas. They needed to understand to what extent their ability to provide these services would be affected by changes in natural asset health.
Kim Fowler, Project Manager, Long Range Planning, Energy & Sustainability at the RDN, explains how her team mobilized next steps following the inventory report:
“After completing our inventory, we identified several potential next steps and evaluated various options with NAI, including valuations. Ultimately, we decided to:
- Develop and implement a natural asset management plan with costed investments.
- Understand the natural services most critical to RDN and those at greatest risk.
- Prioritize actions based on this understanding to ensure effective management.
This structured approach led us to initiate the risk criticality effort, which will help us focus on the most important actions.”
Kim Fowler, Project Manager, Long Range Planning, Energy & Sustainability at the RDN
Step 1 of the risk criticality effort involved categorizing risks:
- Identifying services by natural asset type — for example, that the RDN’s forests can buffer natural hazard impacts such as flooding and extreme heat, build resilience to climate impacts, and protect vital ecosystems for biodiversity; and, that aquifers are vital source of water for the community and healthy stores of groundwater are essential to mitigate the impact of drought
- Assessing risks to each natural asset type and which were tolerable, intolerable but manageable, intolerable and unmanageable, or an imminent or future risk
Step 2 involved identifying risks to natural assets by location and risk type, for example, noting that:
- Forests in the Whiskey Creek area are susceptible to a variety of risks, fires in particular, and require proactive management
- Aquifer overexploitation creates risks related to water supply and drought and, based on water balance models, several areas require further study
The RDN built an understanding of risks in relation to the key services of importance to citizens and the region. They identified six service delivery objectives to guide their natural asset management activities:
Objective 1: Partner with the community in the RDN’s jurisdiction to protect vital ecosystems, watersheds and water supply, balancing conservation and use of natural assets.
Objective 2: Protect source water quality and quantity to deliver water services cost-effectively and sustainably over the long-term, while considering growth projections and current and future climate conditions.
Objective 3: Protect, manage, and restore prioritized natural areas in the RDN to maintain or enhance ecological condition and functioning of watersheds and their ecosystems.
Objective 4: Provide publicly accessible parks and green spaces to support the health and well-being of RDN communities.
Objective 5: Protect the RDN’s communities and infrastructure from natural hazards, such as wildfires, flooding, storm surge and erosion through both land use planning and proactive management of natural areas, while considering current and future climate conditions.
Objective 6: Leverage natural assets to support the RDN’s climate mitigation and adaptation goals. Fowler adds why narrowing the focus helped RDN progress, “Within budget and staff capacities, we prioritized analyzing risks. This approach enabled us to identify connections between risks, natural assets, services, and locations. The next step is to address the implications of these findings.”
Looking Ahead: The Natural Asset Management Plan and Leveraging Investors
With this initial work done, the RDN is now well-positioned to scope their first natural asset management plan. The plan will define priority management actions over a 10-year period that will support them in sustaining the level of service provided by natural assets, and associated costs. In accordance with the 2023-2026 RDN Strategic Plan, some of those actions will involve acquiring more parkland and directly managing or restoring those lands for the benefit of the community. Others will require policies and partnerships with private landowners and First Nations, since the majority of natural assets that provide services to the community are not owned by the RDN.
“The risk assessment will establish the foundation for our next step: developing a risk-informed plan for lifecycle investments in critical watershed areas,” says Fowler. “This will provide focus for our efforts, including being prepared with strategic proposals when the next federal or provincial funding opportunities arise.”
As mentioned, many of the natural assets that support services to the RDN are not within the District’s jurisdiction. Institutional investors play a crucial role in directing financing toward sustainable—or unsustainable—projects and companies. If NAI can provide natural asset management data and insights that strengthen advocacy efforts or help institutional investors make more informed decisions, this would represent a significant positive outcome.
In the case of RDN, data provided by NAI will support the case made to the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo). As AIMCo’s pension fund is a major shareholder of two private companies that own and manage a large portion of the surrounding lands (and the vital ecosystems on those lands), the RDN is proposing a collaborative way forward where AIMCo and other institutional investors could position their portfolio companies to conserve or acquire lands with critical environmental value. This opens the door for partnerships between the District and private companies to support the region’s wellbeing and align with the fund’s social and environmental commitments.
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The RDN is creating a path towards resilience through natural asset management, and NAI has been pleased to be supporting them along the way. Stay tuned for more updates on their progress.
