Adapting to Climate Change: An Introduction for Canadian Municipalities

Greater Vancouver Regional District's Stormwater Management Program

This example illustrates how climate change can be effectively incorporated into existing or emerging planning efforts, avoiding the need to develop new policies and programs.

This approach is encouraging, as it does not require introducing a whole new set of criteria into regional planning.

Climate variation in western North America and beyond is affected by cyclical fluctuations in Pacific Ocean currents and sea-surface temperatures. These changes in ocean conditions in the eastern Pacific include what have come to be known in popular vernacular as El Niño and La Niña, as well as the more recently detected and more scientifically named Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).

The Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD), a partnership of 21 municipalities and one electoral area, is home to more than two-million people with significant growth expected in the future. Its mandate is to engage in regional planning and to co-ordinate and carry out the delivery of essential utility services. The District is in the early stages of addressing climate change. As a regional authority, the GVRD is well placed to play a pivotal role in promoting and facilitating the development of adaptation measures.

The GVRD encompasses the saltwater estuary of the Fraser River delta, bounded by forested mountains to the north and east, and the Canada-U.S. border to the south. The region has a coastal climate characterized by mild, wet winters and warm, dry summers. There are significant variations in the regional climate that occur in cycles ranging from a few years to multiple decades.v For the GVRD, and indeed for southwestern British Columbia in general, it is difficult to distinguish between “natural” climate variation and (at least partly) human-induced climate change. Temperature records indicate a clear warming trend in the region of between 0.5 to 0.8ºC over the past century, and annual precipitation in the region has increased over the past 50 years. Whether this is a “natural” variation or part of a long-term shift, the implication for regional planning authorities, such as the GVRD, is that climate cannot be assumed to be constant and that conditions may change within a standard planning horizon of 20, 50, or 100 years.

THE STORMWATER INTERAGENCY LIAISON GROUP

The GVRD and its municipalities have responsibility under the federal Fisheries Act to protect fish and fish habitat from negative impacts associated with storm and rainwater discharges to the environment. Of concern are potential runoff quantity and water quality changes to the region's many urban and rural salmon and trout streams. The GVRD, its municipalities, and provincial and federal environmental agencies in 2002 formed the Stormwater Interagency Liaison Group (SILG) to facilitate the co-ordination and sharing of common research related to stormwater management (the legal framework used was the Provincial Waste Management Act, which includes the management of stormwater).

One of the primary results of this co-ordinated approach has been the creation of a template for Integrated Stormwater Management Plans (ISMPs), which are watershed- specific, flexible and adaptive strategies. These plans integrate water management issues including watershed health, land use planning, engineering, community values and climate change and variability. Although climate change is not the primary driver in the development of these plans (expanding urbanization and intensive agriculture are), climate change has been integrated into the ISMP process and other approaches directed at managing the health of streams in the region.

In developing the ISMP process the GVRD and its members created an inclusive and comprehensive tool for managing complex risk-management issues that improves the region's capacity to deal with environmental risk, including the potential risks of climate change and variation.

INTEGRATED STORMWATER MANAGEMENT PLAN (ISMP)

The ISMP goal is to develop effective stormwater plans that will result in no net loss to environmental quality and protect communities from localized flooding. The process actively seeks and uses input from various stakeholder groups within each watershed, and brings together planning, engineering, ecology, and flood and erosion protection within an adaptive management methodology. ISMPs will be developed throughout the GVRD in the order of watershed priority.

Within each ISMP process, an advisory group, including representatives from the development, agricultural, and environmental sectors, contributes historical knowledge of the watershed and helps to assess the benefits of the ISMP over time. The general public is involved in evaluating alternative management scenarios and reviewing the plan's success. This roundtable approach relies on a combination of knowledge on land use, water resources, and engineering from governments, local residents and key experts. A widely supported set of final adaptive management rules will allow landowners and developers to make longterm investment decisions with confidence, provide government agencies with regulatory certainty, and ensure that the investments of municipal governments lead to continuous improvements in stormwater management.

Member municipalities have agreed to implement ISMPs in all urban watersheds by 2014. When fully implemented, the adaptive management approach of the ISMPs are intended to address potential drainage, erosion, and flooding concerns, protect riparian and aquatic habitat, and remediate existing excess stormwater runoff. ISMPs will be regularly reviewed and updated.

The ISMP process is progressing well, with several ISMPs completed, underway or planned. While not driven by concern about the impacts of climate change, these planning and risk-management strategies have helped the GVRD to improve its capacity to deal with such changes should they occur.

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