Tracking Progress in NAM — Monitoring Report Phase 2 

The goal of the second Monitoring Report is to update stakeholders on the progress of a municipal natural asset management program introduced by NAI, using case studies of six local governments as examples. The evaluation of Cohort 2 (plus Peel Region from Cohort 1) was meant to provide effective comparisons between the results of the two cohorts. 

Findings show that municipalities are successfully increasing their awareness and capacity for implementation of natural asset management practices, but most are failing to implement NAM policy and plans that cement NAM as an extension of existing asset management programs. While challenges related to capacity and the need for additional NAM-specific resources exist, local governments can benefit by focusing on the enablers of NAM.  The prime enabler of natural asset management is the municipality’s efforts in climate change adaptation and resiliency, supported by provincial interest and plans surrounding climate change adaptation.

Special thank you to the report authors, Sawroop Sandhu and Dr. Michael Drescher from the University of Waterloo, for their detailed work and expertise on this project. 

Natural asset management purports to provide cost-effective, reliable services to local governments, as well as many co-benefits based on healthy, connected and biodiverse ecosystems. But is it really doing that? And how do we find out? 

The answer is harder than it looks.

What results should we monitor – local government policy change? New projects? Land acquisition?  Staff hires? How do we demonstrate causation? Is it a good result if a local government puts in place a natural asset management policy? Or restores a watershed to provide stormwater management services? Has a local government done three times better if they restore three watersheds instead of just one?

In partnership with MNAI, Dr. Michael Drescher and his team at the University of Waterloo have sought to answer some of those questions. The result is a comprehensive monitoring framework (Municipal Natural Asset Management Monitoring Report) and its initial application on MNAI’s first five natural asset management projects (national cohort 1). The framework focuses on:

• the implementation of asset management strategy /plans (e.g., financial, bylaw change) 
• changes in investment (e.g., land acquisition) 
• operational/governance changes
• ecosystem changes to the extent possible

The results show where progress is being made, where it is still needed, and will, over time, help us collectively ensure that natural asset management is as rigorous and effective as it can be. Of course, not all these items can be properly tracked yet; ecosystem changes as a result of a given intervention, for example, may take years to appear. 

Dr. Drescher and his team are now replicating the exercise for MNAI’s second national cohort.  We are also exploring how this monitoring framework can be extended over time so it provides more than a snapshot, and over projects, given how many more projects exist now compared to five years ago.  

Thanks to the Real Estate Foundation of BC for supporting this work.