The early success of the Water Balance Model in British Columbia, particularly in promoting an understanding of how to improve the built environment and protect the natural environment, generated interest in expanding the focus of the tool to reach a national audience.
The EMCO Corporation has collaborated with the inter-governmental Water Balance Model Partnership to sponsor and organize three regional technical sessions on Rainwater Management in British Columbia. The first two events were held in Kelowna and Kamloops in late 2005. The third in the series was an evening session in Victoria in June 2006.
“Stormwater Planning: A Guidebook for British Columbia” formalized a science-based understanding to set performance targets for reducing rainwater runoff volumes and rates. These targets represent the synthesis of biological and hydrological understanding. At the heart of the Guidebook is the Water Balance Methodology. Recognizing that practitioners and others needed a tool so that they could readily apply the Methodology, the Inter-Governmental Partnership then developed the Water Balance Model for British Columbia.
The Inter-Governmental Partnership has partnered with the Real Estate Foundation to build broad-based support for the ‘design with nature’ approach to rainwater management via an Outreach and Continuing Education Program that comprises seminar presentations and training workshops for a range of audience types.
The British Columbia-based Inter-Governmental Partnership is reaching out to academia to bring the Water Balance Model into university classrooms. The University of British Columbia and the University of Calgary are the first post-secondary institutions to incorporate the Water Balance Model in undergraduate and master's level courses, respectively. Dalhousie University in Halifax and the University of Guelph in Ontario have also expressed interest in using this scenario modeling and decision support tool.
“Use of the tool will help design professionals understand what ‘thinking outside the pipe’ and ‘designing with nature’ actually mean in the context of ‘green’ subdivisions that have been built in recent years in British Columbia,” stated Richard Boase. “The tool enables assessment of the effectiveness of site designs that incorporate rainwater source controls such as absorbent landscaping, rain gardens, infiltration facilities and green roofs. The Water Balance Model can be applied at three scales: site, subdivision and watershed.”
Kelowna was the venue for an evening technical session on October 19, 2005 that provided Okanagan municipalities and practitioners with the opportunity to gain insight into emerging practices and products for achieving rainwater management objectives in British Columbia.
The Kamloops chapter of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC (APEGBC) and the EMCO Corporation collaborated in November 2005 to organize a technical session on Rainwater Management.
