Canadian cities can prepare for climate change by building with nature

The housing affordability crisis is top of mind for many around the world, including Canadians. Between 2019 and 2024, house prices in Toronto and Montréal had an average annual increase of 6.7% and 10.2%, respectively.

Prices throughout the country are expected to continue increasing over the next decade and as a result, the pressure is intense to rapidly increase residential development.

Yet, municipal governments must balance this pressure with other tasks, like preparing for the effects of climate change. Some of the most pressing challenges for cities include meeting their housing and climate change goals without massive changes in land use to maintain green spaces and the benefits they provide to people.

Natural spaces like parks and woodlands provide many diverse benefits to city residents, from helping to cool off surrounding neighborhoods to providing recreational areas.

The advantage these spaces have over gray infrastructure is that they can simultaneously help combat multiple challenges faced by cities, including poor air quality, heat waves and flooding. When nature is intentionally used to combat these types of challenges, it is referred to as nature-based solutions.

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

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

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

Nature in development

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

However, this largely happens because they are required by law to protect municipal natural heritage systems (large woodlots or wetlands, for example), and not because they understand or support the benefits from nature, such as flood prevention.

Natural features that fall outside the natural heritage system, such as smaller woodlots or individual trees, are not protected by provincial policy. Instead, they can be protected by municipal policy or bylaws. However, these policies and bylaws vary, and some municipalities do a better job than others in protecting nature for their residents.

Developers often see protected nature as a barrier to development, but some of them also understand that it provides benefits to residents. Some try to make use of nature in innovative ways, like building natural pathways or naturalized creeks through a subdivision.

Unfortunately, municipalities sometimes push back against these innovations because of concerns over maintenance costs and worries about possible interference with infrastructure.

Nature and climate change

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

They stated that planning policies and bylaws are also starting to change in ways that can address these concerns. For example, many municipalities have established tree canopy targets or introduced more restrictive stormwater management requirements.

But climate change is rarely stated as the reason for a change to policy and bylaws. For example, a city might recognize tree cover is important for the city environment and introduce a tree protection bylaw, but that does not mean the bylaw addresses climate change.

Similarly, developers might plant trees to beautify a neighborhood and make it more desirable for home buyers, but they might not do this to reduce climate change impacts. Addressing climate change only implicitly or as a side effect makes it much harder to coordinate different actions and can limit their overall effectiveness.

A main reason why the climate change benefits of nature are considered only implicitly is that planners and developers are uncertain about how reliable the information is for quantifying these benefits.

Another problem is that municipalities differ in how they address these issues, which creates highly variable regulatory conditions. Having province- or nation-wide standards would help fix this issue.

Though they are not yet widely implemented across Canada, some municipalities use green development standards as a key mechanism for introducing benefits of nature in developments. These standards work, for example, by mandating a minimum percentage of green landscaping on a development site. Unfortunately, Ontario’s recently passed Bill-17 has created uncertainty around these standards.

Ways to support nature-based solutions

There are key opportunities to support building more sustainable and climate-ready communities through increased use of nature-based solutions in developments. These opportunities largely come through policy, tools and people:

1. Provincial and municipal policy changes that consider the climate change benefits of nature-based solutions could help increase its use in development. This could be done by strengthening and expanding green development standards, like those currently implemented in some cities.
2. Developing and using tools that can rigorously quantify the climate change benefits of nature-based solutions could also have substantial impact. These tools could clarify the benefits of nature-based solutions and provide a solid argument for their increased use.
3. Collaboration between the public and private sectors is crucial to encourage increased use of nature-based solutions. Whether it is working together to craft realistic policy goals or to incorporate new tools, both sectors are key to ensuring changes are effective and efficient.

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