Land use critical to tackling climate change: region

Planners release paper outlining transformative change for how communities, businesses designed

WATERLOO REGION — The Region of Waterloo will have to undergo “transformative change” in the way homes and businesses are built, subdivisions are designed and communities are planned, and how people get around, under new policy proposals.

Regional planners have released a policy direction paper on climate change as part of an update to the Official Plan, the document that directs land-use planning in the region for the next 30 years.

The policy paper makes it clear climate change will be at the centre of all land-use policies.

“It is a fundamental shift,” said Brenna MacKinnon, a manager of community planning at the Region of Waterloo. “It’s a recognition that more needs to be done.”

The region is expected to grow by 325,000 people and 175,000 jobs between now and 2051 — a 50 per cent jump in population — and that growth needs to happen sustainably, MacKinnon said.

Land-use planning is critical to tackling climate change: decisions about infrastructure and land uses can have implications for centuries. The clearest example of that is the shift that began 60 years ago to separate homes from services, shops and workplaces by building sprawling suburbs that eat up land and make it hard to get anywhere other than by car, the document says.

Some of the ideas in the document are already a key focus in land-use planning: denser, transit-oriented development, and “walkable communities,” where goods, services and workplaces are a 15-minute walk away.

But the paper goes much further, arguing that minor changes won’t be enough to stop the worst impacts of a changing climate.

“The same practices that created the climate emergency — such as personal automobiles powered by fossil fuels, inefficient buildings that require high energy usage to heat and cool, low-density communities that are designed to use personal automobiles to complete daily activities, and the consumption of agricultural land for urban uses — cannot be relied on to get us out of it,” the document says.

It calls for a shift away from a prime focus on cars, by reducing parking or making it more costly; encouraging energy-efficient buildings; having plans of subdivision orient buildings to maximize passive and rooftop solar energy; having secure bike storage at all homes and businesses.

Denser development doesn’t necessarily mean a forest of highrises, MacKinnon stresses. Newer subdivisions such as Williamsburg in Kitchener are already denser, with smaller single detached homes, stacked townhouses and walk-ups, plazas and schools that are nearby and connected with a network of trails.

Many of the directions in the Official Plan won’t be mandatory, MacKinnon said. “They’re aspirational. We have to find a way to implement them with the community on board.”

The policies also aim to create a more resilient region to cope with extreme weather and avoid the power outages, water shortages and other crises that beset Texas after it was hit with winter storms this month. The “wild and wacky weather” that climate change brings — ice storms and flash floods, for example. “We’re seeing it in Waterloo Region now — it’s not in a far-off place somewhere,” MacKinnon said.

You can read the policy paper at engagewr.ca, and can offer comment in an online survey, which ends Sunday. There will be other opportunities for public comment when the proposals come to council for approval later this year.

Feedback on the proposals has been “overwhelmingly positive,” MacKinnon said.