Navigating Climate Change Through Collaborative Natural Asset Management
Drought, floods, sea level rise — all these events occur more often and more intensely around the world and impact critical natural infrastructure such as watersheds and coastal wetlands. So, what can a local government do to ensure it can continue delivering core services like safe drinking water to its residents?
The Town of Gibsons first asked that question in 2016 and has been exploring the role of natural assets and incorporating them ever since. Now, they’ve done even more: Gibsons has expanded their natural asset management (NAM) approach and hit a new milestone with the completion of the Source to Sea Project!
“Source to Sea is the concept that it’s all one water — it’s all connected — and that what happens in the upper watershed has impacts to places downstream,” said Michelle Lewis, Natural Asset Technician at the Town of Gibsons.
The challenge of working with natural assets is that they do not follow regulatory boundaries. Working at the watershed scale provided insight into how different components of the ecosystem interact with each other, noting the added layer of complexity between coastal and freshwater systems.
“For example, we have fully treed greenfield lots in Gibsons that are slated for development,” explained Lewis. “I wanted to understand, based on our current zoning and Official Community Plan, what the impacts of development will be to our stormwater system, particularly the potential effect on our creeks.”
Michelle Molnar, Technical Director at NAI, emphasized the significant progress led by the BC town:
“Gibsons, as NAI’s living lab, continues to push the envelope on natural asset management — from employing the first Natural Asset Technician to exploring marine-surface water interactions — throughout Canada and beyond. We’re grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Gibsons and partners like ESSA Technologies to advance NAM.”
Michelle Molnar, Technical Director at NAI
Read: Meet the world’s first-ever Natural Asset Management Technician!
Why the Aquifer 560 Watershed?
The health of the Aquifer 560 watershed is of unique importance to Gibsons for many reasons, not the least of which being that nearly 100% of the Town’s high-quality water is drawn from the aquifer which is recharged through precipitation in the watershed.
The goal of Source to Sea was to examine natural assets and their interactions across the entire watershed, from where it starts at Mount Elphinstone, in and out of multiple jurisdictions before emptying in the ocean. The watershed is located on the unceded territory of the Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish Nation), including largely undeveloped lands claimed by the Crown and the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD).
While this was not the first watershed-scale NAM effort, the project did look into freshwater-coastal interactions in the contact of NAM, an area of research which had been unexplored.
Result Highlights
The project assessed and valued the watershed’s natural assets and provided recommendations to protect their integrity and safeguard the reliable flow of ecosystem services on which the Town relies. While NAM is about far more than valuing nature’s services, valuations, when used carefully, can bring awareness and inform decision-making within the broader understanding of nature.
- The majority (~60%) of the natural assets in Aquifer 560 Watershed are in high condition, based on details of size, condition, and land-use. Development pressure, deforestation and invasive plant species pose the highest risks to the health of the watershed.
- The total value of Aquifer 560’s natural assets for a single service — stormwater management — is estimated at $40 million ($40,924,000). This value is based on the capital cost to replicate their hydrological functions with conventional management and low-impact development solutions (natural and engineered infiltration and storage techniques).
- The annual value of co-benefit services (specifically recreation, water quality regulation, carbon sequestration, and science and educational opportunities) totals approximately $4.4 million/year.
Some co-benefits are recognized qualitatively; understanding that the Aquifer 560 Watershed is integral to the culture, history, and heritage of the Squamish Nation, Gibsons worked with the Nation to recognize the cultural importance of the watershed to Indigenous peoples as part of the project, linking NAM and conservation with reconciliation efforts.
“That was the most rewarding part of the project, the collaboration helped to further build the relationship between Gibsons and the Squamish Nation.” said Lewis. The report section which outlines the cultural significance of the watershed area, including for hunting and future land use planning, was provided directly by the Nation.
Lessons for Local Governments
“The most important lesson is that this project can be a roadmap for other communities; they can learn from our journey.”
Lewis was thankful for the flexibility of the project team; the complex nature of the project and informing early assumptions helped guide the project in a different direction from where it started.
“One dynamic piece was that the questions we were trying to answer shifted as the project went on,” said Lewis. “For example, we thought there was the potential to couple the coastal and groundwater models, but we discovered over the course of the project that it would be out of the scope of what we were doing.”
As a result, the Town has now begun a project to build a 3D model that will explore the interactions between multiple systems in the watershed.
On the other hand, the multi-year timeframe meant that Gibsons could begin addressing project recommendations identified early in the process, such as acquiring stream flow data, before Source to Sea had wrapped up.
“We had budget for hydrometric stations built into our capital plan to start collecting data, which was great. I don’t feel like I’ve come to the end of Source to Sea with a pile of recommendations thinking ‘how am I going to do them?’ because those were addressed and considered throughout the project.”
More communities are getting interested in NAM, according to Lewis. Through projects like Source to Sea, it’s easy to see how working at the watershed scale just makes sense, but some governments get stalled at the outset.
Lewis’ advice?
“Start with your inventory. Look at what you have, the links to NAM are there.” When it comes to the implementation phase, manageable recommendations, or ones that can be initiated as a part of initial inventory work, go a long way.
She notes there’s also an increasing availability of grants to support NAM work, with clear links to many provincial and federal climate adaptation and reconciliation project funding on the grounds of building resilient communities through natural infrastructure.
What’s Next?
Source to Sea made clear that the watershed’s natural assets require substantially lower lifecycle costs than relying on engineered solutions alone. The flow of water in and out of Gibsons’ boundary could be cause for a jurisdictional nightmare, but efforts are being made to address management collaboratively.
Last year, the Town of Gibsons and SCRD signed the Aquifer 560 Watershed Agreement, enabling both entities to expand monitoring efforts across the entire ecological boundary of the watershed. This includes working with both planning departments to ensure that policies for development permit areas along the jurisdictional boundary are aligned.
“And we’re working on optimizing our drinking water systems, which are connected so we can provide supply in times of drought,” said Lewis. Gibsons is also working to improve water sharing and aligning public messaging with the SCRD.
In related news, Gibsons’ earlier NAM work in White Tower Park is showing signs of success. That project involved enhancing the existing wetland with two stormwater detention ponds. From speaking to residents and visiting the site herself, Lewis confirms there’s been no flooding events downstream since the ponds have been in place — though flooding does arise from coastal surges up the creek.
To tackle coastal flooding, the Town of Gibsons has a few NAM projects in the works, including creek restoration and foreshore work that builds off of the Coastal Resilience project with NAI.
