Green City Clean Waters

When you hear “Philadelphia”, what comes to mind? Their hockey team, maybe? Or the historic cracked Liberty Bell? You might be surprised to learn that this venerable eastern U.S. city – founded in 1682; home to six million – is in the news as North America’s green model on managing storm water.

Since many older Ontario cities struggle with chronic stormwater pollution, we would be smart to look closely at the landmark agreement signed days ago between the City of Philadelphia and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Green infrastructure is at the heart of a $2 billion plan to manage the city’s stormwater runoff. With the EPA’s blessing and technical support, the city will address its aging infrastructure of pipes and concrete – not by perpetuating grey technology, but by shifting to green approaches such as porous pavements, rain gardens, grassy swales and green roofs. As this inspiring three-minute video shows, Philadelphia has embarked on a 25-year plan to capture at least the first inch of each storm through green solutions. One example of how the city is overturning conventional approaches: the city bills landowners for stormwater based on the amount of impervious surface area. Private landowners who reduce impervious surfaces can receive almost 100% rebates on their stormwater bill.

Green Infrastructure is a concept that is right for our times, and my latest Annual Report encouraged Ontario ministries to embrace it. It is a tool that can help us prepare for the twin challenges of a rapidly growing urban population and a less predictable future climate, marked by more extreme weather events and higher flooding risks. Green infrastructure can provide cost-effective approaches in many settings and at many scales.

The Ministry of Infrastructure (MOI) has a key role to play in making green infrastructure a mainstream approach in Ontario. In June 2011, the ministry released a Long-term Infrastructure Plan for Ontario called Building Together. I am pleased that this new plan does at least contain language encouraging municipalities to use green infrastructure. But MOI could also leverage the greening of many provincial projects: MOI was charged with oversight of close to $16 billion worth of infrastructure projects in 2010/2011 alone. There are compelling arguments for MOI to seize the huge potential embodied in green infrastructure, and to translate the encouraging green words of Building Together into pilot projects, measurable targets and goals.

The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario will be speaking at the Munk School of Global Affairs tomorrow about Climate Change, Freshwater Management, and the Role of Science

This event will examine the impacts of climate change on Canada’s freshwater resources. The panelists will explore the importance of scientific research and monitoring in understanding the state of freshwater resources and in managing them sustainably, as well as the linkages between water use and the natural resource sectors in Canada.

Click here to register (Registration is required )

Other speakers:
Scott Vaughan, Federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development,
David McLaughlin, President and CEO of the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy.

The event will be moderated by:
Jeffrey Simpson, National Affairs Columnist at the Globe and Mail, and co-author of Hot Air: Meeting Canada’s Climate Change Challenge

Date and Time: Tuesday, March 13, 2012.
Reception from 8:30am-9:30am.
Panel Discussion from 9:30am-11:30am.

Location: Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility
Map: http://www.munkschool.utoronto.ca/location/

To register, visit: http://www.munk.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=11797 (Registration Required)

Webcast of the panel discussion will begin at 9:30 am (EST) at http://www.powi.ca

People are talking about “huge, ravenous invaders”, and “potential catastrophe”… is it a Godzilla Movie?  No, it’s the Asian Carp, and this fish truly does present a grave threat to the Great Lakes.  Our Great Lakes are already being pummeled by a barrage of pressures, as I have sketched out in my newest Annual Report. The lakes have goopy algal mats fouling many shorelines; their waters are polluted by combined sewer overflows in urban areas and by agricultural runoff in rural areas.  Soon they may have Asian carp too, gobbling up the food of native species, dramatically altering Great Lakes ecosystems and wreaking havoc with both commercial and recreational fisheries.

To control one means of entry for this invasive species, I have suggested that the Ministry of Natural Resources consider tightening its rules on fish importation, and prohibit outright the possession of Asian carp, dead or alive. The seizure of six tonnes of live Asian Carp by Canadian border officials just this past month is sobering.  But another key risk is that this species will swim into the Great Lakes through the link of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.  Now a new study by the Great Lakes Commission and the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative argues for protecting the Great Lakes from this avenue of invasion, and proposes a plan for separating the waterways.  It would be very expensive, yes; but consider the alternatives.

Toronto, January 10, 2012 – The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario says the Government of Ontario must come up with a new strategy to stem the continuing decline in Ontario’s species and natural spaces.  In a special report released today, “Biodiversity: A Nation’s Commitment, an Obligation for Ontario,” Gord Miller says unless Ontario and all other provinces take action, the international commitments made by the federal government will be meaningless.

“The Ontario government did adopt a Biodiversity Strategy in 2005,” says Gord Miller. “Unfortunately, it expired in 2010, and the government has so far chosen not to adopt an updated plan.  Our government cannot avoid its obligation,” says Miller, “to guide Ontario’s response to this urgent crisis.”

In 2010, Canada met with almost 200 nations in Nagoya, Japan and agreed on 20 biodiversity conservation targets that should be achieved by 2020.   But the Commissioner says most of the constitutional responsibility for meeting these targets lies with Ontario and the other provincial governments. “Efforts to halt the loss of biodiversity must be implemented at the provincial level if they are to be effective. And Ontario won’t be able to do that unless it has a new Biodiversity Strategy.”

In Ontario, the most significant threats to the province’s species and natural spaces are habitat degradation, climate change, invasive species, overexploitation and pollution.  The Commissioner has previously warned about the lack of action to safeguard the province’s 200 species at risk such as snapping turtles, cougars, and Jefferson salamanders. Gord Miller has said the government also needs to address the threats from invasive species like Asian carp, and protect wetlands and woodlands in southern Ontario.

The Environmental Commissioner says, “the federal government has promised, during the current International Decade for Biodiversity, to conserve biodiversity on behalf of all Canadians.” It is imperative that the Government of Ontario acts quickly and come up with a plan to implement those commitments.  This requires a new Biodiversity Strategy. Rhetoric alone will not suffice.”

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 The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario is appointed by the Legislative Assembly to be the province’s independent environmental watchdog, reporting publicly on the government’s environmental decision making.

Download the special report “Biodiversity: A Nation’s Commitment, an Obligation for Ontario” and the Commissioner’s opening remarks to the Legislature at http://www.eco.on.ca/

Watch the Commissioner’s comments of this report here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-6mWZcio4

For more information, contact:

Maria Leung

Communications and Outreach Coordinator

Environmental Commissioner of Ontario

416-325-3371

1-800-701-6454

maria.leung@eco.on.ca

For support in French, please contact Jean-Marc Filion at 705-476-9665.

Aussi disponible en français 

Memories from the destructive blow of Hurricane Hazel on Southern Ontario on October 15, 1954, still linger. Torrential rain devastated many communities. Bridges, roads and railway lines were washed out. Homes were flooded or collapsed from the force of raging water overflowing from swollen creeks and rivers. The biggest tragedy, however, was the loss of human life. More than 80 Ontarians lost their lives in this catastrophic event.

Hurricanes and severe storms are often described as rare and extreme events; somehow this suggests they are out of our hands and that it is okay to merely hope they won’t happen. Unfortunately, they do happen. I grew up in Timmins, and played in Town Creek. I recall the Timmins Storm of 1961 that ripped roads apart and drowned a family in their home. The Peterborough storm of 2004 overwhelmed the city’s storm sewer system and left most of the city under a meter of murky water. We are wiser to accept that these extreme weather events will happen and must be planned for.

Planning for severe storms will become even more important in the future under a changing climate, as the severity and frequency of such events are expected to increase. In my 2009/2010 Annual Report, I called on the Ministry of Environment (MOE) for swift, coordinated and decisive action on “Planning for Stormy Weather.”

MOE has recognized the need for a policy framework to support resilient municipal stormwater management systems. The ministry has also identified the need for updating existing stormwater management guidelines and for a concerted planning effort by a number of provincial ministries, municipalities and conservation authorities.

For this important planning work, we will be relying on the ongoing good work of conservation authorities. Conservation authorities manage flood control and prevention infrastructure and work closely with provincial, federal and municipal levels of government to prepare for and respond to extreme weather events. They deliver programs that prevent some $100 million in flood damages every year. To continue their important work on mitigating flooding risks, CAs will need adequate funding. For over a decade, provincial funding for these programs has remained steady at about $7.6 million per year, eight times less than the early 1990s. It is estimated that an additional $14 million per year is needed from the province.

More storms are coming our way; will we be prepared? Will we have the resilience to weather them?

Commissioner’s Remarks to the Green Infrastructure Ontario Coalition Launch:
November 22, 2010, Evergreen Brick Works, Toronto

A Vision for a Green Infrastructure in Ontario

So what is green infrastructure?  Before we can answer that we have to understand a more basic question: What is Infrastructure?

The Ministry of Infrastructure says that its objective is to make strategic investments that will meet the needs of a growing population and economy by identifying what infrastructure developments will most benefit key public sectors and the standard of living in Ontario over the long run.  They divide those investments into four major categories:

• Education
• Health Care
• Transportation
• Municipal and Local:
  • Safe drinking water
  • Environmentally responsible sewage and waste disposal
  • Health promoting parks and recreation facilities
  • Better local  roads, bridges and transit

Most of those investments are done through an agency called Infrastructure Ontario.  On its website, the following current projects are listed:

• 37 hospitals and health care
• 11 justice system
• 4 highways and roads
• 1 data centre

These projects are not driven by provincial mandate; they are based on applications received for capital projects from various institutions in our society.  So in a real sense, this is how “we” collectively see infrastructure.  And, although it seems that the goal of all those infrastructure things is to keep our water clean and safe, not pollute our environment and protect our health … we mostly do it by pouring a lot of concrete, laying a lot of asphalt and constructing a lot of steel and glass.

These are necessary things, but are they sufficient to meet the goal?  Sounds like drinking water is covered, and maybe sewage, but what about storm water … the water that runs off after rainstorms and feeds our streams and rivers?  In most urban areas its quality is not so great, and although there are rules and policies, storm water quality isn’t really reflected as a priority in this model of infrastructure.

What about air quality?  Surely urban air quality has public benefits and standard of living implications.  Certainly the emphasis on health and medical treatment helps us deal with the impacts of smog days and poor air quality – but how does our infrastructure spending model help us improve air quality?

What about thermal control?  Our urban areas are often heat islands, accumulating heat well in excess of suburban or rural landscapes surrounding.  Of course this adds to our air conditioning energy costs but, more importantly, we must recall the European heat wave of 2003 that killed 35,000 people … we have been spared this type of event so far, but for how much longer?  How does our infrastructure model address that risk?

And there are other public benefits and implications to our standard of living.  I mentioned energy costs: does our infrastructure paradigm reflect the growing need to improve our energy productivity and control costs?  Do we require or even endorse distributed electrical generation?  Do we take advantage of ground source or solar thermal heating opportunities?  When surplus heat is available, do we capture it in district heating systems like the Europeans do?  On a global level, we have a responsibility to reduce our GHG emissions, is such a reduction a natural function of our infrastructure investments?  And on a more local scale, are we building infrastructure and protecting it in a way that will maximize its life and thus minimize our replacement costs?

Since there are these other benefits and improvements to our quality of living in the long term that are available, perhaps it would be wise if we reconsidered our perspective of what infrastructure is and how we could bring in other tools and approaches into our infrastructure toolkit. Many of those tools could be things we have come to characterize as green initiatives.

We actually have a lot of interesting green stuff around the province.  Toronto and some other cities have some pretty sophisticated systems to improve and maintain tree biodiversity and coverage within the city.  We have some urban parks and sometimes have ravines or escarpments that are ecologically rich natural systems.  Some municipalities like Richmond Hill have added to these lands by building quite sophisticated and naturalized storm water management facilities.

Toronto has a green roof by-law which in increasing greening its roofscape, but I don’t think it has anything yet like the rooftop of the Rideau Centre in Ottawa where four stories up there are lawns and gardens and trees 25 cm or more in diameter with baby rabbits hopping around.  And there are only a few instances where the carpet of living things we put on top of our buildings is encouraged to spread down the sides and integrate into the grey water and storm water management systems and other landscaping.  The techniques of actually designing for building integrated vegetation (BIV) are in their early stages of development.

There is a great renaissance in urban agriculture occurring across the province.  Although it’s worth noting that what may be new to some, has always persisted in the yards of many immigrant neighborhoods.  Nonetheless, it is growing and spreading and presents a different view of the urban landscape.

We love to make our urban surfaces hard to support the weight of our various machines and the high volume of human traffic, and so far our hard surfaces are impermeable to water.  Unlike living soft surfaces which absorb water and process pollutants, hard surfaces collect wastes and pollutants during dry periods and shed them rapidly into streams and rivers during rainfall and snow melt events.  We know how to build permeable hard surfaces, but their adoption is limited so far.

So there are green tools for the infrastructure toolkit.  But they are just pieces, scattered around, not integrated into the normal course of business, because they are not seen as parts of a greater infrastructure approach.  The benefits of cost savings and improvements to the quality of life they offer are lost because we see infrastructure as just the buildings and pipes and roads and wires that we construct.

Perhaps it would be useful to step back and consider another complex infrastructure that we are familiar with … it is called a forest.  It was here before the urban areas of Ontario were built and it functioned quite well.  It ran exclusively on renewable solar energy and had a large built environment that was self sustaining.  It produced 100% of the food for its inhabitants and recycled 100 % of its waste.  The air in the forest was clean and cool and the shaded environment did not experience photo degradation.  The streams of this infrastructure flowed clear, clean and cool.

The forest (much modified) is still with us, of course.  It’s all around us and if you look at Google Earth for Toronto, for example, you will see how the forest seamlessly penetrates the urban landscape right down to where we are standing.  It is still here and it is still functioning to some extent … still cleaning the air and the water and where we don’t rush in to pick it up, processing its own wastes.  It is part of our infrastructure and it is providing benefits and improving our quality of life.

We can’t have the all the environmental benefits of a forest in a human occupied urban landscape, but we can learn from nature.  We can see what works and why and investigate the interconnectedness of the systems.  We can do things differently.  We can make a human landscape that not only utilizes all those tools I have listed to get the benefits described but does more than that.  We can have a living environment rich with living things to which people intrinsically respond in a positive and relaxed way.

So my task was to define what green infrastructure is so that the coalition can get on with its task …

Green Infrastructure is a new way of conceptualizing our urban landscape … a way of integrating life and life forces into our urban living spaces that maximizes the utility of ecosystem goods and services thus lowering operating costs and capital replacement investment while improving our well being.  Green infrastructure is about good business and a good life.

Thank You

This section of our 2009/10 Annual Report, Redefining Conservation, is now online.

Ontario faces many challenges as it enters the second decade of the 21st century. The economy is recovering from the effects of the recession that began in late 2008. But, the economy is changing, moving away from such “high carbon footprint” primary industries as iron and steel and pulp and paper to a “greener” economy based on more efficient manufacturing, renewable energy and information technology. At the same time, the environment is facing unprecedented challenges from a growing population, increased pressures on aging infrastructure and a continuing upward trend in greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.

The Ontario government has responded to this “perfect storm” of challenges – and opportunities – with an ambitious agenda of legislative initiatives and policies to green the economy while fostering a “culture of conservation” within the energy sector. This part of the Annual Report describes the role that the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, 2009 will play in helping to bring about this fundamental change. As well, this part describes the promise (and pitfalls) of fast-tracking renewable sources of electricity and the development of a “smarter” grid.

This part also describes amendments made to the Environmental Protection Act that are designed to provide a better understanding of where greenhouse gas emissions originate in the province – through mandatory reporting of these emissions by companies within key sectors of the economy. As well, the amendments have established the legislative basis for pricing carbon emissions through the introduction of a cap-and-trade system. Pricing carbon and identifying the big emitters are necessary precursors to the development of a low-carbon economy.

The need to develop a conserving society underscores the maxim that “the economy is the wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment.” We ignore this principle at our peril. But, in embracing the spirit and intent of these legislative initiatives, we should not lose sight of an equally important principle: to safeguard every citizen’s right to a fair, transparent and open process of consultation and public participation in this crucial decision-making.

Read More:

• Powering the Future: The Green Energy and Green Economy Act, 2009
• Ramping Up Renewables: MOE’s Renewable Energy Approvals
• MNR Approvals for Greening the Grid
• Mandatory GHG Reporting: What gets Measured gets Managed
• Pricing Carbon: Can a Cap-and-Trade System Deliver the Tonnes?

Download the Commissioner’s power point presentation on the four pressures on public decision-making that will shape events in the coming decades: climate change, peak energy, biodiversity loss and water shortages.

Four Issues that Really Matter

At Globe 2010, we saw a new way to capture power from water. It is essentially a system of water wheels that can be set up in existing streams of water, without needing to modify the environment.

For more information, please see Seabell International.

This new method of heating water reduces energy consumption, saves water and facilitates efficient usage, limiting greenhouse gas emissions.