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“After the Climate Gathering, we had stacks of evaluation and I wrote a report. We really listened to participants and what they wanted to see moving forward, what the event meant to them. What we heard was that nobody wanted it to be a one and done. So, as a community and a nitty gritty planning team, literally that event was pulled together by the collaborative process of partnerships that got us the little bits to make one big bit. We are all coming from different places. To develop a terms of reference, we asked ourselves three questions,” stated Cindy Lise.

Zbigniew Grabowski has made the leap from university professor and researcher to executive director of a watershed alliance. “My work is about a new paradigm that addresses root causes of water quality issues by moving away from the modernist project of humans as separate from nature. Because academic systems are not really lined up with deep transformative action, I was not able to develop an intersectoral program based on the doctoral work that I had done.I just needed to jump ship and start swimming with the current that I want to swim with.”

Political commitment is a theme that weaves through and permeates the stories behind the stories of innovators who have led by example. Without leadership at the top, plus everything else being in alignment, change is unlikely. Staff champions in local government can only carry things so far. Most of all, there must be political commitment. “Elected officials saw rainwater management as something positive we could grab onto and run with. And this helped create champions and build committee support for green infrastructure,” stated former mayor Darrell Mussatto.

“My role is that of a regional coordinator. I coordinate groups and distribute the training and help coordinate people to actually do the monitoring. The idea is that you could have other regional coordinators around the province or anywhere applying this model that we have created. We hope to be able to expand the network in the future. But it is taking longer than we thought it would. It is an adaptive approach to see what works, learn the lessons, and then figure out how to overcome challenges that we have experienced along the way,” stated Ally Badger.

Erik Karlsen had a remarkable impact on the shape of BC communities. For a generation of elected representatives, he was a familiar face in the local government setting. Erik Karlsen had an unparalleled network of connection with Georgia Basin communities – and most importantly, a high degree of trust with those communities. The legacy of Erik Karlsen is rippling through time through the work of the Partnership for Water Sustainability in leading the Georgia Basin Inter-Regional Educational Initiative, successor to the Georgia Basin Initiative.

“Living Water Smart was a government commitment plan, 17 years ago with 50 commitments signed off by the government of the day. Many public servants have worked over many years to deliver on those commitments. But government administrations change, ministers change, priorities change, budgets change. That process carries on its own world. What matters is that the Living Water Smart story has stood the test of time and continues to resonate. Everybody pulled a piece of yarn out of that plan and knit a sweater,” stated Lynn Kriwoken.

The waterbucket.ca community is about networking and collaboration and waterbucket.ca provides a platform for learning from each other through sharing of success stories. The 20th anniversary of the waterbucket.ca website is an opportunity for celebration as well as reflection. “The waterbucket.ca website is providing reasons to have the conversations about ‘why change’.The resulting awareness of need will help us obtain the mandate to implement watershed-based land use planning,” stated Marvin Kamenz, Director of Community Planning with the Town of Comox.

“The Ecological Accounting Process is about the condition and financial value of municipal stream assets that supply ecological services, Urban streams are rarely managed as ecological systems or as municipal assets. When local governments obtain a financial value for streams as spatial assets, they can include them in their asset management plans and budgets. EAP gives municipalities the methodology and metrics that will let them add streams to their asset management strategy,” stated Tim Pringle.

“The region’s continued health and sustainability demands that we treat it as one system, not as a composite of separate and jurisdictionally distinct entities. As Parliamentary Secretary for the Georgia Basin Initiative, I had a visionary document and strong personal support from Minister Marzari at the top. And I had Erik Karlsen’s on-the-ground connections with Basin communities and their issues. All I had to do was run with it, And that’s what we did!. The Georgia Basin Initiative was successful because we had the right people at the right time,” stated Joan Sawicki.

“The drought of 2015 suggests we may be crossing an invisible threshold into a different hydro-meteorological regime in Western North America,” stated Bob Sandford in 2015. Events have proven him to be right. Over the past decade, it has been one drought after another, dramatized by the extremes that impacted BC communities in 2021 and again in 2023. The mountainous nature of BC’s geography means that BC communities are typically storage-constrained, and what storage they do have is measured in months. This accentuates risks, uncertainties and vulnerabilities.