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“Communities rely on a range of services such as roads, underground utilities and parks to support life-style and property enjoyment. Through taxation, these constructed commons are maintained and managed in order to ensure their availability. Institutional services such as fire protection and schools are a related kind of constructed commons. As defined by EAP, a natural commons is an ecological system that provides ecological services used by nature and the community. But the commons word means little to the average person. So, we created a visual aid to help audiences grasp the concept,” explained Tim Pringle.

“Community resilience is defined as the sustained ability of a community to utilize available resources to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations while continuing to deliver critical community services. The goal of enabling and supporting community resiliency also brings to the fore the role of land use and community planning; the very profession that develops the policy and plans that either enable or impede the resiliency we seek,” stated Christine Calihoo.

The big picture context for EAP is whether a local government has a strategy for its constructed assets. Success over the long-term depends on local government political commitment to the guiding principles of sustainable service delivery. Bridging the infrastructure funding gap for constructed and natural assets requires an intergenerational commitment. “Lack of a long-term financial plan to support asset management really forces an incremental erosion of the service level. That is why forward looking long-term financial statements are so important to inform Council decisions,” stated Christopher Paine.

How will communities ensure that streams survive as healthy ecosystems in an urban setting? This existential question defines a key challenge facing local governments in an era of weather extremes. EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, provides communities with a path forward. It is the means to inject balance into the natural asset management conversation. “We needed a measure of financial value that could be applied on stream systems generally, not just because somebody somewhere had done something somehow. And then it struck me, the BC Assessment database is the lynchpin for financial valuation,” stated Tim Pringle.

Three landmark initiatives came to fruition in 2014. One of these is ‘Asset Management for Sustainable Service Delivery: A BC Framework’. It makes the link between local government services, the infrastructure that supports the delivery of those services, and watershed health. The BC Framework provides context for EAP. “The BC Framework points the way to integration of natural systems and climate change thinking into asset management. Resilient cities will be the ones that can absorb water and manage the water cycle as a closed loop,” stated Liam Edwards

John Henneberry’s pioneering work serves as validation of how EAP looks at streams and water assets as a system. His eclecticism produced real insights into the operation of land and property markets, enabling all involved to see things more clearly and differently. His interests lay at the interface between planning and property. “An industry has developed that values different aspects of nature in different ways. Our view of nature is biased to those aspects of it that can be measured and particularly to those that can be valued,” stated John Henneberry.

“What gets measured gets managed (or could be). The challenge for local governments is how to determine financial values for a natural asset such as a stream system. The community uses and enjoys these assets and expects local government to include them in asset management plans and budgets. EAP provides an original way to analyze and present data from existing sources as well as field observations. The analytical and quantitative steps are designed to be carried out by local government and collaborators, primarily stream stewards,” stated Tim Pringle.

“The question is, how does one create a situation where the environmental perspective is on an equal footing with the engineering and accounting perspectives? Only then can there be a balanced and productive conversation about annual budgets for maintenance and management (M&M) of assets, whether those are constructed assets or the natural component of the Drainage Service. The growing cost due to neglect of the Drainage Service, combined with the urgency of the drainage liability issue, is the driver for linking municipal infrastructure asset management and stream health as cause-and-effect,” stated Kim Stephens.

“There are a lot of ‘greening’ and sustainability initiatives, but they are not conceptually unified. They are neither thought about in terms of interdependencies nor systemically. We had this moment of realization about the diversity of plans when it clicked in our minds about analyzing all the plans in terms of three big buckets: something that is very stormwater-focused, something that is very land-focused, and something that is trying to integrate the two. In the process, we started to uncover this grain of systems thinking within green infrastructure planning,” stated Dr. Zbigniew Grabowski.

“EAP provides the reason for anyone and everyone to ask a fundamental question, why aren’t stream health factors considered and given equal weight to engineering considerations? The community expectation that these assets will be maintained and managed is the impetus for the reason for looking at asset management differently. EAP provides local governments with the philosophy, methodology and metrics they need to make the financial case for stream systems. Maintenance and management (M&M) of stream systems can now be integrated into a Local Government Finance Strategy for sustainable infrastructure funding,” stated Kim Stephens.