NAI working with Prairie planners to balance nature and growth
We’re back! NAI’s team has returned from two impactful workshops with planners in the Prairie region. With development pressures top-of-mind, NAI engaged planners on their role in growing communities where both people and nature thrive.
The visit was supported by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) through its Natural Infrastructure for Water Solutions Program. NAI worked with the Saskatchewan (SPPI) and Alberta (APPI) Professional Planning Institutes to support professional training in natural asset management (NAM).
As a result, NAI delivered in-person workshops at the SPPI conference in Saskatoon, and again to APPI members in Calgary earlier this month, with housing being a key issue in both sessions.
The need for increased housing supply is being felt in almost every region coast to coast to coast, and the Prairie provinces are expected to have some of the strongest economic growth across the country.
Planners are pivotal to how this plays out. They aren’t just planning for houses, but the infrastructure that comes with it: roads, water supply, parks, stormwater drains, and more. They are central to creating balanced, resilient communities that foster economic growth while simultaneously protecting the environment and enhancing quality of life.
Nature can be a powerful ally in achieving these outcomes. Even if planners only cared about the bottom line — and NAI’s time in the Prairies shows they care about much, much more — they should care about natural assets.
That’s because natural asset management (NAM) is more than ‘do-gooding’; it’s part of a cost-effective solution to deliver vital services that challenges grey infrastructure-only approaches. It’s also a practical way to improve a community’s resilience to climate change and mitigate risks to service delivery.
Current efforts to accelerate housing means that now is a crucial time to expand professional capacity in NAM. By collectively enhancing our understanding and application of natural asset management, planners can lead the way toward a more sustainable and resilient future for our communities.
See Both/And: Integrating Natural Asset Management into Federal Housing Supply Policymaking
This is a summary of 25 responses from NAI workshop participants at the SPPI conference. It’s worth noting that recreation, safety, and public spaces were also at the top of the list.
What Can Planners Do?
Professional planners shape community growth; by improving climate resilience, living conditions, and managing the costs and risks associated with service delivery, planners can also ensure that the homes people aspire to live in are not only built, but built in the right spot to be cost-effective into the future.
What could that look like when it comes to natural assets?
Consider this scenario: a community is working to reduce their stormwater runoff by restoring and maintaining wetland areas alongside (or instead of) the usual grey infrastructure solutions. Evidence demonstrates that a nature-based approach can deliver this service at a lower cost, and with the added benefits of increasing wildlife habitat, carbon storage capacities, and aesthetics.
- On local government-owned land, planners can advance this objective by developing policies and design guidelines for low-impact development, engaging in land acquisition, and promoting lifecycle management activities that encourage naturalization and restoration.
- On privately-owned land, planners can still exert a profound influence by crafting community plans (such as Official Community Plans, Municipal Development Plans, and related strategies) that prioritize the recognition and preservation of nature and its services.
This includes, for example, master plans that favour the retention of areas providing substantial ecosystem services, development permits that advocate for smaller footprints and the preservation of green spaces, and encouraging public support through education and outreach initiatives.
Be the Instigator
Whether it is in support of housing, connectivity, recreation or any other objective, planners have the power to initiate efforts to consider the natural assets in their region, and establish objectives in long-term plans that outlast election cycles.
At the site or community level, planners can help with:
- Understanding Nature’s Value: recognizing the evidence shows how nature provides invaluable services is fundamental. From here, a local government can work to fill gaps in knowledge on their specific natural assets, and how they may contribute to priority services.
- Establishing the Planner’s Role: acknowledge that planners have a critical role in securing these services for the long term, and should therefore start considering necessary steps to support these services with nature.
- Gathering Baseline Data: monitor and gather data on existing natural assets, their condition, and assess their risks to determine necessary interventions.
- Cross-Departmental Collaboration: NAM is interdisciplinary; working across engineering, accounting, recreation, and public health departments ensures that land use policies are informed by a comprehensive understanding of natural assets.
- Meaningful Collaboration with Indigenous and Métis Nations: building and maintaining relationships with Indigenous communities creates an allyship that can be leveraged for the common good of the land and real reconciliation. The most effective land use strategies meaningfully integrate Indigenous cultural values and ecological knowledge. This knowledge may include different risks to natural assets and priorities for their management.
As Patience Cox, founder of Thynk Leadership Inc., stated in a recent panel on advancing affordable housing through NAM:
“The reality is, is if you want the Indigenous community to help you actually leverage [land use], then you need to come in at the beginning before you’ve made your plans, before you’ve decided what the perfect solution is. Sit down with them, be prepared. It’s going to take time. Once you have built that relationship with respect, now you have a partner who is actually going to bring you to the table.”
Patience Cox, founder of Thynk Leadership Inc.
Growing Professional Capacity in NAM Planning
Through its work to date with over 130 local governments and a very small but growing number of First Nations, NAI has been building a growing NAM practice, contributing to the establishment of norms and standards, and promoting the increasingly widespread adoption of NAM.
There are some leading communities successfully integrating natural assets into their planning processes. Some key examples include:
- The Town of Gibsons, British Columbia, was able to decrease development cost charges for drainage services by 74 per cent because the natural assets that provide stormwater services do so at a lower cost than engineered alternatives.
- The cities of Courtenay and Grand Forks, BC, have both placed the importance of natural assets and conscious land use planning at the core of their Official Community Plans.
- Through bylaws and new policies, the City of Selkirk, Manitoba, has institutionalized asset management while naturalizing public areas; this enhances both climate resilience and aesthetic appeal through initiatives like the Eveline Street Reconstruction.
The focus for NAI now is on helping to grow these practices in Canada and highlight more case examples. A recent publication from IISD and NAI examined how to advance natural infrastructure capacity across professions to meet growing demand in the Prairies. In addition to overall investment, closing this gap requires professional development training, using and improving existing guidance tools, and promoting the links between natural infrastructure and climate resilience.
With the above in mind, NAI’s immediate next step involves delivering more training initiatives like those done in collaboration with IISD, APPI and SPPI. NAI expects that further engagement of professional planners in natural asset management in the Prairies and beyond will create a foundation for developing better planning guidance, tools, and norms.
Training & Resources
With that mind, here are resources to build professional skills in NAM:
- Natural Asset Management Fundamentals microcredit, Royal Roads University and NAI
- Climate Change Adaptation Training for Prairie Region Planners, Climate Risk Institute
- Collaborative Consent online course, Centre for Indigenous Environmental Resources – Ecoversity
- Nature is infrastructure: How to include natural assets in asset management plans, NAI 2024
- Planning with nature in the Prairies: Guide to integrating natural asset management in local government plans, NAI 2024
- Natural infrastructure and Prairie prosperity: Current contributions and opportunities for growth in the natural infrastructure sector, IISD 2024
