As a leading organization and ‘living lab’ for natural asset management (NAM), the Town of Gibsons, British Columbia, chose to work with NAI to expand the spatial scale of their earlier NAM efforts — which focused on either land-based or coastal and marine issues — to consider the entire Aquifer 560 Watershed through the multi-year Source to Sea Project.
The health of Aquifer 560 is of critical concern for the Town of Gibsons for many reasons, not the least of which being that nearly 100% of Town’s high-quality water is drawn from the aquifer. The Watershed begins at the top of Mount Elphinstone (“the source”) and extends to the sea.
Additionally, a key consideration for NAM is that natural assets rarely align with political boundaries, which creates management challenges when natural assets than one entity relies on are under the ownership/jurisdiction of others. Collaboration amongst many entities at the watershed scale is ultimately required for effective NAM.
The Source to Sea Project reports describes the resulting efforts of the Town of Gibsons to tackle some of these barriers, and ensure that natural assets within the Watershed are understood, measured, valued, and ultimately managed to protect their integrity and safeguard the reliable flow of core infrastructure services and co-benefits.
Results to date are highly relevant to many other communities in Canada and potentially beyond, given that almost 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 km of a coast. Furthermore, Source to Sea undertook an iterative approach in which some of the new findings and results were implemented as the project progressed.
The Source to Sea project builds on previous work by NAI, Urban Systems, and Gibsons that evaluated flood protection benefits provided by the pond system at White Tower Park, as well work by DSF, NAI, ESSA, and CBCL to evaluate flood and erosion protection benefits from coastal natural assets.
The Town of Gibsons acknowledges that it is situated on the unceded traditional territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation). This is the ancestral territory of the Skwxwú7mesh speaking peoples and has been stewarded by them since time immemorial.
The Aquifer 560 Watershed is on territory that was never ceded or given up to the Crown by the Skwxwú7mesh peoples. The term unceded acknowledges the dispossession of the land and the inherent rights that the Skwxwú7mesh hold to the territory. The term serves as a reminder that the Skwxwú7mesh have never left their territory and will always retain their jurisdiction and relationships with the territory.
