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“The modern stormwater industry seeks to balance traditional issues with emerging priorities which are being placed on our infrastructure. Practitioners are experienced in working at the coal face,” stated Andrew Allan. “The growing need to work in multidisciplinary teams, to lead and influence, to understand and assimilate different points of view and technical requirements, will be core skills required in the future.”

Julie McGraw, acting on behalf of Stormwater Australia, announced the three inspirational keynote speakers for STORMWATER 2016. She highlighted that the three were invited to provide different forms of inspiration: Kim Stephens as a pioneer and champion in leading technical change; Rachel Robertson as leader of Australia’s Antartic Research Expedition to Davis Station; and Michael Groom for demonstrating perseverance under life-threatening conditions.

“A commonality of understanding between BC and Australia is that we are managing a water balance in a connected system of human endeavour and ecosystem processes. This is a shared discovery. Systems analysis of water balances is a key shared process. Integration of urban planning and water resources management is a key issue,” observed Dr. Peter Coombes, Australian water champion and advisor to governments, when he reviewed the Abstract for the keynote by Kim Stephens.

The ideas presented by Kim Stephens resonated with the Australian audience and opened eyes and minds to a different way of thinking. Rod Wiese, member of the Stormwater Australia Board, provided this perspective: “Australian ‘best practise’ (which is founded on water quality metrics) falls dramatically short of effective waterway protection. Clearly, we need to manage volume and restore water balance pathways as Kim Stephens explained in his keynote about the primacy of hydrology.”

Under the leadership of Meredith Laing, the Lower Hunter & Central Coast Regional Environmental Strategy is e a model for Local Government collaboration in Australia. In 2001, she invited Kim Stephens to share his British Columbia experience related to overcoming barriers to implementation (“fear and doubt”) and implementing an ecosystem-based approach to stormwater management. It was a seminal moment.

Coined by Dr. Daniel Pauly in 1995, the Shifting Baseline Syndrome refers to a gradual change in the accepted norm for ecological conditions. This was the first of three ‘big ideas’ introduced to the Stormwater Australia audience. “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,” stated Daniel Pauly.

The ‘new normal’ in British Columbia is floods and droughts. What is changing is how and when water arrives. “After a period of relative hydro-climatic stability, changes in the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere have resulted in the acceleration of the global hydrologic cycle with huge implications for every region of the world and every sector of the global economy,” states Bob Sandford.

In the 1990s, transformational research by Richard Horner and Chris May taught practitioners that ‘changes in hydrology’, not water quality, must be the primary focus of their efforts. “When I look back, and reflect on how we saw things at the time, I offer this hindsight: the significance of our research findings was in gaining recognition of the ‘primacy of hydrology’. Until then, it was all about water quality,” states Richard Horner, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington (Seattle).

In BC, the Province enables outcomes. It does not prescribe solutions. Everyone needs to agree on expectations and how all the players will work together. After that each community can reach its goals in its own way. “The regional team approach is founded on partnerships and collaboration; and seeks to align actions at three scales – provincial, regional and local,” states Glen Brown, General Manager, Union of BC Municipalities.

British Columbia is moving from asset management to ‘sustainable service delivery’, with a focus on protecting the ‘water balance services’ that a watershed system provides. “Moving beyond traditional engineered infrastructure asset management to also account for nature’s services will help influence ‘standards of practice’ and represent a leading-edge evolution in how infrastructure is planned, financed, implemented and maintained in BC,” stated Wes Shoemaker, BC Deputy Environment Minister.