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“One of the key elements of making a watershed work is addressing rainwater,” says Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart. “Allowing it to filter through the soils, allowing the proper biological processes rather than simply large catch basins and taking the water out by storm sewer. By really focusing on the health of the watershed, I think we can end up with a much healthier environment and a better community.”

“The Screening Tool is an intermediary step in the assessment process that also happens to include the opportunity to provide a look at how climate change will affect the drainage systems. The tool also makes it is easy to assess the relative significance of changes in land use, in particular densification. Local governments can now consider both climate change and land use change at the same time, and with the same tool,” says Jim Dumont.

“Rain gardens have ecological importance, and are a standard requirement for all developments in the City of North Vancouver. In addition, all of our major transportation projects incorporate rain gardens. A single rain garden will not make a material difference to conditions in our creeks. But 1000 rain gardens would be a different story. These will take time to implement. The process will be incremental,” states Mayor Darrell Mussatto.

“The City’s vision is that we can enhance and elaborate the interface between urban and natural states. For more than a decade, the City has been demonstrating how to do this. In doing this work, we are not re-creating pristine natural conditions. Rather, by designing with nature we are creating an informed and intentionally designed urban landscape,” states Doug Pope.

“Once you get started with any new process, you get feedback that generates ‘collisions of ideas’. The processes get better and the products become stronger. And that is what we are seeing in the City. Push-back from developers declined once they saw what a rain garden looked like for the first time. From all perspectives, it gets easier and easier with each successive installation,” concludes Peter Navratil.

“We have arrived at a good place, but the journey has not been easy. In fact, we had to work our way through some pretty contentious periods. We persevered, we adapted and we progressed. We want other local governments to know about the good, the bad and the ugly of the Coquitlam story so that they may learn from our experience and know that it is okay to stumble,” states Peter Steblin.

“We have a plan; there is agreement about the goals; we are developing tools for use by staff, developers and homeowners; and we have a schedule of opportunities. Everything that we need is in play. It is important that we seize opportunities to tell the Hastings Creek story. It is also essential that we communicate why and how we are being successful. If we all tell the story, then people will become energized in the re-telling,” states Gavin Joyce.

“Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. But they don’t perceive what happened before as a loss. You can have a succession of changes. At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. And the question is, why do people accept this?,” stated Daniel Pauly.

For the last 50 years, heavy rain events have been happening more frequently across the Midwest. “It’s not a large increase, but it’s measurable, We’re going to have to build our systems to be more resilient to basically cope with changing variability. Variability is a key, key issue for us as a society,” says Jeffrey Andresen.

“It is about looking for simpler methods to determine if there is a problem that needs detailed analysis. It is not, and never was, intended to be a replacement for detailed analyses. It should be seen as an intermediary step in the assessment process that also happens to include the opportunity to provide a look at how climate change will affect the drainage system,” said Jim Dumont.