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“Showcasing Innovation has helped local government practitioners immeasurably by creating forums for them to share their experiences and lessons learned. This has created a ripple effect that has spurred even more innovation. The 2008 Series can play an integrating role to cut across disciplines and ultimately help communities create neighbourhoods that integrate both good planning and innovative engineering designs,” stated Ray Fung.

The Delta theme was “Greener Developments, Roadside Rainwater Management and the Urban Forest”. The program showcased Delta’s green infrastructure initiatives and shared lessons learned.

“The Green Infrastructure Partnership is promoting use of a ‘green' vocabulary that reflects an understanding of the relationship between land and water,” stated Paul Ham, Chair.

There would be value in funding a catalogue of local government policies and practices that accommodate settlement while at the same building in green value. “The ultimate objective in developing the catalogue is that it will enable the sharing of preferred practices across regions,” stated Chris Jensen.

According to Kim Stephens, the relevance of the South Okanagan example is that it too was a Convening for Action regional pilot: the Regional Growth Strategy is water-centric (plan with a view to water), and recognizes the relationship between land and water (both in terms of water use and water runoff). The innovation is the toolkit that follows policy, and which leads to benchmarking and monitoring/measuring what matters.

The mission of the Water Sustainability Action Plan is to facilitate the move toward a more sustainable approach to water resource management. “In 2006, a notable highlight was conducting a consultation workshop to launch ‘Convening for Action on Vancouver Island’,” wrote Ray Fung, Chair.

“It is the telling of the story about an event that takes on importance in moving practitioners from talk to action. A key is that those who were there come away inspired and start doing things differently in their day jobs as a result of what they learned by being part of the moment,” stated Kim Stephens.

”In BC, the approach that we are taking is to set the goal. As a result, we are seeing people in local governments leapfrogging each other to see how close they can get to the goal,” stated Chris Jensen.

“In moving towards water sustainability, we envision that developers that balance settlement and ecology will be rewarded. Because time is money, we believe that environmental environments can be paid for through money saved as a result of faster approval times”, stated Graeme Bethell. “Because we believe that Vancouver Island has all the ingredients in place for success, we believe that it will emerge as a water sustainability pilot for North America.”

“The strength of the CAVI approach on Vancouver Island is the engagement of its partners on a one on one basis who “buy in” to the vision of water-centric planning. The process is accumulative, as others from diverse backgrounds are drawn to the common goal of achieving water sustainability. Each progressive step builds upon the previous success story,” wrote Eric Bonham.