Natural assets to be inventoried
Two Nova Scotia municipalities will get some bonus help in efforts to adapt aging infrastructure for climate change.
The Municipal Natural Assets Initiative (MNAI) has launched a project that will help some 30 municipalities, including Halifax Regional Municipality and the District of Lunenburg, determine how to deliver services like providing safe drinking water and managing floods in a costeffective way during dramatically changing climate.
“We are excited to be part of MNAI'S initiative to better understand and value our vital natural assets,” Shannon Miedema, energy and environment manager with HRM, said in a MNAI release.
“This project will not only be a valuable resource to support our decision-making, it will enable us to improve natural asset management approaches and support our climate adaptation work as we strive to implement our ambitious climate plan, Halifact,” Miedema said.
Halifact, the aggressive $22-billion, 30-year climate action plan endorsed by Halifax regional council in June, includes an energy retrofit strategy, development of an electric vehicle strategy, exploration opportunities for new-zero standards for all new buildings, a framework for assessing and protecting critical infrastructure, support for communities for climate adaptation and climate-related emergencies and the financial strategy to put the plan into action over three decades.
Mayor Carolyn BolivarGetson said the Municipality of the District of Lunenburg is “very excited to be part of this innovative project to map our significant and treasured natural assets.”
“This partnership will help us develop a better understanding of what our natural assets are, and how we can protect them or enhance them in our effort to fight climate change,” Bolivar-getson said.
An anonymous donor and the Greenbelt Foundation are devoting $500,000 to enable local governments to simultaneously partner with MNAI to work with nature and accelerate their first step towards delivering some core services to communities from healthy, well-managed natural assets.
MNAI, a Canadian not-forprofit that offers solutions to Canadian municipalities facing problems of aging infrastructure and ecosystem decline, will work with local governments to build an inventory of their existing natural assets — such as forests, wetlands, aquifers and beaches.
MNAI'S ongoing work with communities has shown that these natural assets can provide the same level of service as many engineered assets, and often at a much lower cost to the balance sheet and to the environment.
“More and more of Canada's approximately 3,600 local governments are undertaking natural asset management,” said Roy Brooke, executive director of MNAI.
“However, the rate of uptake is not commensurate with climate change adaptation, mitigation, biodiversity and infrastructure service delivery challenges this approach can help to address.”
Brooke said the acceleration project will help address that by “doubling the number of communities in Canada that are starting to understand, value and manage natural assets as vital infrastructure on which we depend.”
MNAI'S mission is to make municipal natural asset management a mainstream practice across Canada in order to address climate change adaptation and mitigation and improve human and ecosystem health and well-being.
After a call for proposals, MNAI used a set of selection criteria to identify participant governments from across Canada of various sizes and service delivery challenges.
The initial list of participating municipalities includes four other Maritime locations — Charlottetown, Moncton, Florenceville-bristol, N.B., and Stratford, P.E.I.
As a final step in the project, MNAI will provide the local governments with their tailored natural asset inventory, a dashboard to support their decision making, and a roadmap on next steps they can take to increase or improve their natural asset management approaches.