Canadian cities can prepare for climate change by building with nature

The housing affiliation crisis is in the lead for many in the world, including Canadians. Between 2019 and 2024, housing prices in Toronto and Montreal had an average annual increase of 6.7% and 10.2%, respectively.

Prices across the country should continue to increase during the next decade and, therefore, the pressure is intense to quickly increase residential development.

However, municipal governments must balance this pressure with other tasks, such as preparing the effects of climate change. Some of the most urgent challenges for cities include the achievement of their housing and climate change goals without massive changes in the use of land to maintain green spaces and the advantages they offer to people.

Natural spaces such as parks and woods offer many various advantages to the city residents, help to refresh the surrounding districts to the supply of leisure areas.

The advantage of these spaces on gray infrastructure is that they can simultaneously help fight the multiple challenges facing cities, including poor air quality, heat waves and floods. When nature is intentionally used to fight against these types of challenges, nature -based solutions are called.

However, nature -based solutions are still rarely implemented in developments. Therefore, it is important to identify and use key opportunities that can help communities balance their competing objectives by increasing the use of nature -based solutions.

By highlighting these opportunities, we can inform municipal governments, developers and residents of how communities can be built to combat climate change and other challenges.

In our recent study, we interviewed Ontario planners and developers to identify these opportunities.

Developing nature

Municipal planners and private land promoters of Ontario are obliged by provincial policy to consider nature in their decisions concerning the planning and development of neighborhoods.

However, this is largely happened because they are held by law to protect municipal natural heritage systems (large woods or wetlands, for example), and not because they understand or support the advantages of nature, such as the prevention of floods.

The natural characteristics that fall outside the natural heritage system, such as small woods or individual trees, are not protected by provincial policy. Instead, they can be protected by politics or municipal statutes. However, these policies and regulations vary, and certain municipalities do a better job than others to protect nature for their residents.

Developers often consider protected nature as an obstacle to development, but some of them also understand that it offers advantages to residents. Some try to use nature in an innovative way, such as building natural paths or naturalized streams through a subdivision.

Unfortunately, municipalities sometimes repel against these innovations due to concerns about maintenance costs and concerns about possible interference in infrastructure.

Nature and climate change

Overall, planners and developers we have interviewed have recognized that nature can help communities fight against the effects of climate change.

They have said that planning policies and statutes are also starting to change in a way that can respond to these concerns. For example, many municipalities have established targets of canopy of trees or introduces more restrictive requirements for rainwater management.

But climate change is rarely stated as the reason for a change in policy and regulations. For example, a city can recognize that the coverage of trees is important for the city’s environment and introduce a tree protection regulations, but that does not mean that the regulations addresses climate change.

Likewise, developers can plant trees to embellish a neighborhood and make it more desirable for house buyers, but they could not do so to reduce the impacts of climate change. The fight against climate change only implicitly or as a side effect makes much more difficult to coordinate different actions and can limit their global efficiency.

One of the main reasons why the advantages of climate change in nature are only implicitly considered is that planners and developers are not sure of the reliability of information to quantify these advantages.

Another problem is that municipalities differ in the way they solve these problems, which creates very variable regulatory conditions. Having standards across the province or country would help solve this problem.

Although they are not yet widely implemented through Canada, some municipalities use green development standards as a key mechanism to introduce the benefits of nature in developments. These standards work, for example, by obliging a minimum percentage of green landscaping on a development site. Unfortunately, Bill 17 recently adopted by Ontario has created uncertainty around these standards.

Ways to support nature -based solutions

There are key possibilities to support the construction of more sustainable communities and ready for climate thanks to an increased use of nature -based solutions in developments. These opportunities largely come from policies, tools and people:

1. Changes in provincial and municipal policy which consider the advantages of climate change in nature -based solutions could help increase its use in development. This could be done by strengthening and widening green development standards, such as those currently implemented in certain cities.
2. The development and use of tools that can rigorously quantify the advantages of climate change in nature -based solutions could also have a substantial impact. These tools could clarify the advantages of nature -based solutions and provide a solid argument for their increased use.
3. The collaboration between the public and private sectors is crucial to encourage increased use of nature -based solutions. Whether working together to develop realistic political objectives or to incorporate new tools, the two sectors are essential to ensure that the modifications are effective and efficient.

This article is republished from the conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.