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“Accepted ‘standards of practice’ – especially those for engineering, planning and finance – influence the form and function of the Built Environment. Implementing green infrastructure, turning the clock back, shifting the ecological baseline, and creating a watershed legacy will ultimately depend on the nature of changes in standards of practice,” states Kim Stephens.

“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.

The Inter-Regional Education Initiative fills a gap. “While Metro Vancouver’s Stormwater Interagency Liaison Group (SILG) provides a forum for Metro Vancouver members and senior government regulators to share information on rainwater and stormwater management issues, there is no formal mechanism to enable inter-regional collaboration,” stated Robert Hicks.

Glen Brown explained what his Ministry means when it urges local governments to view watersheds through a Sustainable Service Delivery lens. “This builds on the principles of Asset Management. It is going to be a component, and a requirement, under the next Gas Tax Grant Program. This is where we will find traction in moving Sustainable Service Delivery forward,” he said.

“Bowker Creek is provincially significant and precedent-setting. It is also inspirational. In my 40-year career as a professional engineer, there is nothing that equals it. And the reason it is so important is that it gave the rest of us a vision of what can be. The experience of what this region has done is informing others, from Metro Vancouver all the way up to the Comox Valley,” stated Kim Stephens.

“The IREI supports implementation of integrated and watershed-based community planning processes on the east coast of Vancouver Island and in the Lower Mainland. A desired outcome of inter-regional collaboration is accelerated implementation of affordable and effective watershed sustainability and green infrastructure practices,” states Derek Richmond

“The Regional Board is committed to achieving the vision that we share for watershed sustainability in our region. We also appreciate the leadership shown by Kate Miller in guiding the CVRD to the destination. Kate truly is a champion. She is demonstrating how benefits are flowing to this region because we collaborate with other regions,” stated Mayor Rob Hutchins, Chair of the Regional Board. in June 2008, the Cowichan Valley was the first demonstration region for the Learning Lunch Seminar Series approach to continuing education for local government practitioners.

“The Province’s decision to embed the ‘Water Balance Methodology in Stormwater Planning: A Guidebook for British Columbia’ defined a turning point in the regulatory vision for drainage planning, and that is: ‘design with nature’ and forestall problems rather than reacting to problems after they have occurred,” says Ted van der Gulik.

“Communities have been struggling with the question of how best to move forward on the Watershed Health issue, particularly in light of a changing climate and financial drivers to provide higher levels-of-service at reduced levels-of-cost. Inter-regional collaboration will help each region understand what the other regions are doing, what works and what does not. The mantra for inter-regional collaboration is framed in these terms: Through sharing and learning, ensure that where we are going in indeed the right way,” stated Jody Watson.

“If the goal is protection of aquatic resources, a water quality driven program would not achieve the goal. Two key messages flowed from the research: salmon would already be gone by the time pollutant loading is a factor in salmon survivability; if we get the hydrology right, water quality typically takes care of itself. The stream health findings by Horner and May gave us a springboard to ‘reinvent urban hydrology’. This early research established that 10% impervious cover is a threshold level at which fisheries biodiversity and abundance are initially and significantly impacted,” stated Peter Law.