“The genesis for Integrated Stormwater Management Plans was a desire to integrate the community, engineering, planning and environmental perspectives. The implicit goal was to build and/or rebuild communities in balance with ecology. Local governments knew they had to do business differently to restore watershed health,” stated Robert Hicks.
“The Screening Tool is an intermediary step in the assessment process that also happens to include the opportunity to provide a look at how climate change will affect the drainage systems. The tool also makes it is easy to assess the relative significance of changes in land use, in particular densification. Local governments can now consider both climate change and land use change at the same time, and with the same tool,” says Jim Dumont.
“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 the question is, why do people accept this?,” stated Daniel Pauly.
“Fundamental change in the scope of rainwater/stormwater planning, development standards, construction and operations will only happen if there is a broad understanding as to why the changes are needed, what they are, and how they can be practically implemented. The ability of consumers and the development community to adapt will then set the pace of change,” stated Erik Karlsen.
“After ten years of involvement with the Partnership for Water Sustainability, I feel as committed as ever. At times, I find myself amazed at the collective expertise of the volunteers who work in Partnership initiatives. Their wisdom makes the work of the Partnership efficient; it allows a great deal to be done with very limited dollars. We collaborate with practitioners as equals and take services to their territories,” states Tim Pringle.
In his 1969 book, Design With Nature, Ian McHarg pioneered the concept of environmental planning. “So, I commend Design with Nature to your sympathetic consideration. The title contains a gradient of meaning. It can be interpreted as simply descriptive of a planning method, deferential to places and peoples, it can invoke the Grand Design, it can emphasize the conjunction with and, finally it can be read as an imperative. DESIGN WITH NATURE!,” wrote Ian McHarg.
“Avoidance of a future financial liability is a driver for Sustainable Service Delivery. This starts with land use and watershed-based planning. No matter what level of Asset Management implementation a local government is at, the key message is that including nature, natural resource management and natural services into their thinking should be done at the beginning – and the beginning has everything to do with planning,” stated Glen Brown.
The volume-based approach that is being implemented in British Columbia picks up the baton that Dr. Ray Linsley started more than a generation ago. As a professor at Stanford University, Linsley pioneered the development of continuous hydrologic simulation as the foundation for water balance management. “In the 1960s, Linsley championed the paradigm-shift from empirical relationships to computer simulation of hydrologic processes. He had little or no use for ‘simple hydrology’ and the many simple equations that were used to represent the hydrologic cycle,” stated Thomas Debo.
“This article makes important comparisons between stormwater management in the US and Canada. Although both are moving toward greater use of green infrastructure, the differences in approach are significant…. and practitioners in the US can learn a great deal from BC’s approach,” stated Janice Kaspersen.
