Tag:

natural commons

    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Know Your History and Context to Offset Generational Amnesia” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in November 2021


    “Every generation is handed a world that has been shaped by their predecessors – and then seemingly forgets that fact. One of the first times this particular type of generational amnesia was observed was back in the 1990s. What this blindspot meant, Daniel Pauly argued in a short-but-influential paper, was that the scientists were failing to account fully for the slow creep of disappearing species, and each generation accepted the depleted ocean biodiversity they inherited as normal,” stated Richard Fisher.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Shifting Baseline Syndrome and Resilient Rainwater Management” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in November 2021


    “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 that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were. And the question is, why do people accept this? Well because they don’t know that it was different,” stated Daniel Pauly.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Adapting Asset Management to Climate Realities” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in November 2021


    “For asset management, the consideration is how and when assets might be compromised in their lifecycle by climate change and certainly that new assets need to consider what climate change impacts will affect their lifecycle and levels-of-service. Framing climate change impacts this way does not clearly align the changes to asset performance. But what if the scenarios are reframed with the uncertainty being the timeframe that a threshold is reached and not the uncertainty of change for a future date?” stated Robert Hicks.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: Living Water Smart in British Columbia: “Financial Case for Bowker Creek in the  Capital Region” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in October 2021


    “EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process provides communities with a philosophy, pragmatic methodology and metrics to make the financial case for annual investment to prevent degradation and improve the condition of ecological assets that constitute a stream corridor system. Use of EAP to establish the ‘financial case for the stream’ would put maintenance and management (M&M) of stream corridor systems on an equal footing with constructed assets (municipal infrastructure),” stated Kim Stephens.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process is Game-Changing!” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in October 2021


    “Streams and other water assets are Natural Commons Assets. Everyone has expectations, enjoys and uses them, and so on. There is an implied contract to maintain and manage them so that they will be there in the future. But from an asset management point of view, we do not have the metrics and so we do not measure ecological services. While we know their impacts, we just don’t know the order-of-magnitude of harm or problems that those impacts have. EAP at least gives us an order-of-magnitude measure,” stated Tim Pringle.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Blue Ecology Virtual Seminar on Creating a Climate for Change” – released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in October 2021


    “Are you prepared and willing to change your definition of water in science? And if you are, what would the change in definition look like? This is what reconciliation really gets down to when we are talking about interweaving Indigenous knowledge and Western science. No longer is it ceremonial. Is Western science prepared, for example, to add the moon to the hydrologic cycle? From the Indigenous perspective, we believe it should be there,” stated Michael Blackstock.

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    CONTEXT AND HISTORY REALLY DO MATTER: “In the moment, extreme events can be overwhelming. But the big picture situation is by no means hopeless. My key message is to view climate change as another variable, not a driver. Understand the system context because climate adaptation is about water, whereas climate mitigation is about carbon,” stated Kim Stephens, Executive Director, Partnership for Water Sustainability in BC (Sept 2021)


    “The risks are real. Droughts affect all of us. BC is on fire and streams are drying up. We do not have the luxury of time to implement solutions. And we certainly cannot afford to reinvent the wheel due to generational and/or corporate amnesia. Context and history really do matter because it takes a career to develop perspective and understanding of what works and what does not. Because there is no silver bullet, communities need to do many little things to adapt to the new climate reality,” stated Kim Stephens.

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    HIDDEN VALUE OF INTERGENERATIONAL COLLABORATION: “My experience is that collaboration between the generations is easier than most people think and the generational differences are not that wide. Also, intergenerational teams are much more innovative,” stated Kate Rushton, UK-based community strategist


    “Two years ago I attended my first intergenerational innovation challenge. It was not my last. Afterwards, I occasionally thought about this new way of working. It sparked my interest in intergenerational co-creation. Not only as a way to build bridges between generations but as a way to innovate in general. By using an older adult’s experience-based knowledge, which is known also known as deep smarts, and the younger generation’s fresh eyes and new perspectives intergenerational co-creation can help create more rounded solutions,” stated Kate Rushton.

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    DOWNLOAD A COPY OF: “Living Water Smart in British Columbia: Communicating with Plain Language is a Guiding Principle,” released by the Partnership for Water Sustainability in September 2021


    “By focusing on Vancouver, New York City, Auckland, Sydney, Copenhagen, and Amsterdam I plan to capture a global picture. One area I am particularly interested in is communication, or the lack thereof. In the sciences, one of the largest challenges to research is science communication. A lot of fantastic studies are misinterpreted outside of scientific circles because the language, style and meaning of science writing is very different to non-specialists. With climate change studies, this can lead to a serious disconnect between climate change policy and the supporting research,” stated Charles Axelsson.

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    WATCH THE VIDEO: “The Partnership for Water Sustainability has its roots in government – provincial, federal, and most importantly, local government. Over three decades, the Partnership has evolved – from a technical committee in the 1990s,to a water roundtable in the first decade of the 2000s, to a legal entity in 2010,” stated Kim Stephens, Partnership Executive Director, in his remarks as part of the Bowen Island Climate Conversation (July 2021)


    “Incorporation of the Partnership for Water Sustainability as a non-profit society allows us to carry on the Living Water Smart mission. We are growing a network, not building an organization. In terms of my professional career as a water resource engineer and planner, I have been in the right place at the right time, and with the right people. In a nutshell, my responsibilities revolve around delivering the Water Sustainability Action Plan through partnerships and collaboration, through a local government network,” stated Kim Stephens.

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