“I’m pretty positive about the future... but we need to have the conversations in our communities [that will generate] the kind of mobilization we had in WWII. [This] is what we’re going to need now.”
Bruce Sampson, Former VP Sustainability, BC Hydro, speaking at Gaining Ground 2, May 2008, Victoria, BC
by hans peter meyer
Extreme storm events in recent winters have brought the cost of climate change home to a number of BC communities and households. The insurance industry is bracing itself for higher costs associated with claims related to climate change, and the anticipated hikes in premiums will hit all of us who own or rent homes and business properties. In a sobering essay on the need for planning models that will help us be effective in our efforts to do more than simply push cash at the problem, UBC’s Patrick Condon cites a 2007 British Treasury Department review on the “Economics of Climate Change.” The report warns that the financial “costs of correcting this problem [are] affordable in the short term, but if nothing [is] done soon, the coming global economic calamity [will] make the depression of the 1930s look like a period of great luxury.” Condon's essay and the Treasury report were written before the current global financial crisis. Failure to plan for adaptation and mitigation of climate change becomes even more critical in the current context.
The science on climactic change suggests that the single most effective step BC communities can take in the face of this threat is to enhance our ecological and economic resilience. We do this by conserving, protecting, and rehabilitating the ecological systems in our regions. Conservation, however, only stems the tide. We need also to get at the source of the emissions that our conserved forests and fields are so effective at storing. The problem is that we have an approach to land use and development that is most vexing: approximately 25% of Canada’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from auto exhaust, says Condon, “and this amount is growing.” We’ve built our communities on the basis of cheap, single occupancy vehicle (SOV) transportation. We're now just beginning to pay the price. Sprawling rural and suburban growth has put us in a bind: it’s hard to rationalize public transit, or other service efficiencies; we're facing huge costs to build roads and bridges to facilitate ever more SOVs. What we need, says Condon, is a “more carbon-efficient relationship between transportation and land use...”
In BC, the people who control the shape of growth are local government officials, civic staff like planners and engineers, and developers – and ourselves as home buyers. We need, as former BC Hydro VP of Sustainability Bruce Sampson put it, to have conversations at a community level that lead to a general "mobilization." We need our elected leaders and our municipal staff – and those of us who own and develop land – to seriously look at policies and practices that will address our climate change challenges. Condon, whose work on sustainable planning at UBC's Design Centre for Sustainability has helped make Vancouver an international focal point for practical approaches to sustainable community design, suggests looking at our cities and towns as “Machine[s] for Carbon Mitigation” – human-built constructs “capable of extensive adaptation for GHG reduction.” His thinking dovetails with Nicholas Heap's assessment in Hot Properties, a report on the impact of climate change on real estate values and the industry.
The value of homes, businesses, and recreational properties in BC is an important part of our current prosperity. Sustaining and protecting these values is in the interest of the real estate industry, but also in the interest of individual homeowners, and certainly of local government which is charged, at least indirectly, with providing a policy and regulatory framework to sustain community land and economic values. Heap makes several recommendations to planners and regulators consistent with Condon’s call for a reimagining of our communities as more “carbon-efficient” and more resilient to climactic change. A partial list includes:
• ensuring that zoning and development guidelines adequately protect residents and local development against identified vulnerabilities to global warming – and the municipality itself from liability – when planning or permitting new development, installinng infrastruture or approving retrofits to existing developments;
• recognizing the influence of urban form over greenhouse gas emissions, and implement policies that result in reduced emissions per capita over time.
From these first steps a series of policies would emerge, including general principles like, but not be limited to:
• intensification of town centres by promoting mixed use development;
• reinvestment along empty corridors and brownfields and redevelopment of strip mall type roads;
• promotion of regional planning, alternatives to SOV transportation; and
• protection of existing compact residential development.
Taking these steps now – or having taken them in the past – is helping make a number of cities and towns more carbon-efficient right now. The tools we need aren’t new, nor are they particularly challenging to our current expectations about quality of life. In some cases, all that is required is to look at planning and settlement patterns in parts of Europe. In other words, even with the current economic downturn, developing land use practices that are adaptive to climate change and that mitigate its impact are not a 'return to the Stone Age' but an opportunity to address issues of social, cultural, and environmental quality of life that will benefit the community and the economy. For his part, Sampson challenged community and business leaders to assume a new willingness to embrace certain kinds of risk – not the risk of wishing climate change away, but of trying out planning and engineering tools that are being used in other parts of the world. We need to risk weaning ourselves from the “old business-as-usual” and experiment with approaches that are new to us.
Building on successful implementation, we can explore visions of community design and land use that give us better quality of life than we currently enjoy in many of our towns and cities. Condon imagines “[s]treet infrastructure reconceptualized to provide a host of unprecedented ecological and transportation services.…[including] storm water management, ground source heating and cooling, and urban heat island mitigation. Streets might be reconceived for bicycles and pedestrians only, while rooftops could be converted for ‘green roof’ community food production and local jobs.” Some of this is already happening in North American cities desperate to make changes in dysfunctional transportation and urban design. The 2008 Gaining Ground 2 conference in Victoria gave ample evidence, from places as diverse as Chicago, Santa Monica, and McAllen, Texas.
Condon is not sanguine about the challenge facing towns and cities, or any of us who live with the everyday reality of our carbon-inefficient land use and transportation choices. Nevertheless, a “dramatic reimagining of the city,” he suggests, “may be the only one with sufficient capacity to project the 80 percent reduction in aggregate CO2 production that most experts agree would be required by 2050.”
Like colleagues at UBC and across North America, Europe, and Asia, Condon has been active developing a host of “sustainability” tools. They form part of a growing toolkit that is helping community leaders and developers reimagine our relationship to the land base that we all depend on. Sometimes interest is driven by a growing market interest in “green” development. Most recently, these tools are inviting interest due to the prospect of economic, social, and environmental chaos precipitated by climate change. In themselves, the tools are only part of the answer. They are a set of technologies and applications, ranging from “smart growth” development principles to “design with nature” alternatives to big pipe engineering to “green building.” They include technologies that reduce pollution and taxes, increase civic interaction and recreation, and create healthier, more productive workplaces and homes. Taken together they represent a shift in how we see ourselves in relation to the ecological systems that sustain us.
The benefit of this shift is more than simply forestalling the kind of threat forecast by the British Treasury report. As a recent speaker at the 2008 Gaining Ground conference put it, becoming wiser in our use of land has many benefits, including:
• more mobility choices (including less congestion if we are willing to question the supremacy of the SOV);
• more amenities (higher densities can mean more efficient taxation leading to more choices for recreation and services, the potential for area-wide heating/cooling systems and transportation systems, etc);
• better design qualities leading to higher quality, healthier buildings and neighbourhoods;
• more money in our pockets as we spend less on roads and bridges, as we have more practicable opportunities for affordable housing, and lowered health care costs because we walk more, breathe cleaner air, etc.
The “new business-as-usual” begins with the kinds of conversations generated at Victoria’s Gaining Ground 2008 event. The conference was an excellent opportunity for elected officials, local government planners and engineers, and those wishing to be on the cutting edge of real estate and land development to see and hear how communities are responding positively to the challenges of climate change. Historically, growth in BC communities has been at the expense of social and environmental qualities. With the kind of “reimagining” of land use and development proposed by Condon, and with the kinds of implementation of existing planning tools and knowledge showcased in communities around the world, we are beginning to see examples of how growth can foster positive settlement solutions.
In BC, growth and our current attractiveness to the world presents us with an opportunity. As the west coast Village of Ucluelet is showing us with its stormwater management strategies and expectations of developers, it is possible to reach beyond accepted wisdom, to take the risk of approaches from outside the “old business-as-usual” box. The Ucluelet example is not without its problems, but taking risks has helped this small community expand the conversation of change that needs to take place across BC. It helps mobilize all us who work on or with the land. Together, we can create the “new business-as-usual” polices and practices that integrate our need for housing and economic development with the natural ecosystems that support our quality life on the planet. At a time when we're already wrestling with financial challenges to the old business as usual approach, one risk we needn't take is to ignore the implications that climate change is beginning to have on the economic and ecological bottom-lines of our households and communities.
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[A version of this article was originally published in The Island Word, October 2008. This article was published through the support of the Real Estate Foundation of BC .]
resources:
Patrick Condon, “Planning for Climate Change" in Land Lines, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, January 2008
Nicholas Heap, Hot Properties: How Global Warming Could Transform BC’s Real Estate Sector, 2007
© hanspetermeyer.ca / 2008-2009
www.realestatefoundation.com
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