The Town of Pelham (population ~18,000) is in the heart of the Niagara Region in southwestern Ontario. The Pelham Greenbelt Natural Asset Management Project identified natural assets in both the Town of Pelham, home to significant environmental features and agricultural lands, as well as lands that intersect with Ontario’s Greenbelt. At 2 million acres, the Greenbelt is an ecologically rich protected area that supports key habitats and ecosystem services for millions of Canadians in the Golden Horseshoe region.

The Town of Pelham’s focus was the role natural assets, especially those that overlapped with the Town and the Ontario Greenbelt, played in providing stormwater management and flood mitigation services. The project also quantified the natural assets in terms of service provision, including determining costs and benefits relative to engineered alternatives. The report provides 11 recommendations and a planning framework to guide the Town of Pelham’s continued improvement in natural asset management, manage current risks facing natural assets, and support climate-resilient asset management and land-use decision making.

The Project is unique to previous NAM initiatives in that it had specific considerations for the local government and the Ontario Greenbelt. Maintaining natural assets and ecological connectivity in these areas is important for economic and environmental prosperity in the larger region, especially with respect to addressing climate change and development pressures.

Highlights:

• The inventory assessment defined a total of 4,428 individual natural assets across 10,458 hectares, the majority being agriculture followed by swamp and forest. Overall, about 26% of the assets were in very good condition, and about 12% were assessed in good condition.
• Natural assets provide $585,859,327 in stormwater management services, based on the capital costs to replace similar services with built infrastructure (specifically stormwater management ponds and low-impact development units). 
• Natural assets also support several co-benefits — taken together, the combined ecosystem service value for carbon sequestration, recreation, freshwater supply, and habitat provision ranges from $22.1 M to $24.7 M per year. 

The Pelham Greenbelt Natural Asset Management Project was generously supported by the Greenbelt Foundation.