Water-Centric Planning

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Tim Pringle

    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “You can do all the research that you want but you need good people in government to implement changes in engineering and development practices. They must be technically savvy and have the drive or desire to give back and do good work,” stated Dr. Chris May, retired Surface & Stormwater Division Director, Kitsap County Public Works in Washington State


    For two decades, Chris May had a leadership position in Washington State local government – first with the City of Seattle and then with Kitsap County. The latter was his living laboratory. Because he was Division Director, he could put science into practice. “Kitsap is at a manageable scale. The County is big enough to effect change and make things better. That was our goal – have a positive impact on the community! We knew we needed to work on multiple scales and on multiple fronts to improve conditions in our small stream watersheds – that was our strategy,” stated Chris May.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Local governments have real data to quantify the financial value of streams as physical assets. This metric allows them to put streams into the basket of local government asset management responsibilities,” stated Tim Pringle, Chair of the Ecological Accounting Process (EAP) program


    “If we know how to do a much better job of protecting ecological features and stream systems in our communities and on our landscape, then why aren’t we doing a better job? Why are streams still being degraded? These are among the questions driving the EAP program. The methodology and metrics focus on the land underlying the natural asset. In the case of stream systems, this is the setback zone defined in B.C. provincial legislation – namely, the Riparian Areas Protection Regulation,” stated Tim Pringle.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “The Watershed Security Strategy is the obvious mechanism to revisit, understand, learn from, and leverage past successes in the building blocks continuum. We have tools to help do the job,” stated Ted van der Gulik, President of the Partnership for Water Sustainability in British Columbia


    “A Partnership strength is the real-world experience we bring because of our multiple initiatives under Living Water Smart Actions. Under that vision, various building blocks processes have evolved over the decades. Living Water Smart successes are defined by collaboration and a “top-down and bottom-up” approach. This brings together decision-makers and community advocates. Successes are milestones along a building blocks continuum. We can achieve better stewardship of BC’s water resources for present and future generations,” stated Ted van der Gulik.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Dr. Jane Wei-Skillern always acts as a great sounding board about the concepts underpinning our network approach in general and our Ambassadors Program in particular,” stated Derek Richmond, Partnership for Water Sustainability (November 2022)


    “The biggest takeaway from our conversation with Dr. Jane Wei-Skillern concerns the ‘what, how and who’ as the current leadership of the Partnership looks ahead to pass the baton.. Using the Partnership’s Ambassadors Program as the example of WHAT; – this was the breakthrough to articulate our need for succession planning and sustainability of the network. The WHO now becomes obvious because it is the ambassadors themselves. The HOW is now clear too, by looking back at what we were successful with in the past,” stated Derek Richmond.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Well-maintained municipal infrastructure assets are worthless IF THEY DO NOT provide a service. Also, for any asset management approach to be successful, it must not focus on the infrastructure asset by itself,” stated Glen Brown, founding Chair of Asset Management BC


    In British Columbia, local governments must show how they are progressing along the Asset Management for Sustainable Service Delivery continuum. “Money – it should be about how to get the most value out of every dollar spent on municipal infrastructure. Too often, thinking stops after the capital investment is made. Yet everyone needs to be thinking in terms of life-cycle costs, including future recapitalization of the investment,” stated Glen Brown. Section 7 of the Community Charter defines the roles and responsibilities of local government in terms of “care of infrastructure and services”.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, defines the stream and regulated setback zone as the Natural Commons Asset. The NCA has a financial value which we determine through an analysis of parcel data using BC Assessment for sample groups,” stated Tim Pringle, EAP Chair (October 2022)


    “Start with an understanding of the parcel because that is how communities regulate and plan land use. It is the parcel level where you get the information that you need to change practice to protect natural assets. That is what everyone must get their heads around. Having a defensible number allows us to look at riparian condition and set targets for restoration. The riparian condition is one measure of the state of M&M over time. We usually find the streamside setback zone is in a deficit position because things that ought to have occurred to protect it have not,” stated Tim Pringle.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Society tends to neglect the future in favor of the present. Positive change is the result of long, hard work by thinkers and activists. We can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory.” – Dr. William MacAskill, philosopher, author and professor with the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom (September 2022)


    William MacAskill is a proponent of what’s known as longtermism – the view that the deep future is something we have to address now. Although most cultures, particularly in the west, provide a great many commemorations of distant ancestors – statues, portraits, buildings – we are much less willing to consider our far-off descendants. “In societies undergoing rapid change, we feel more disconnected from the distant future because we struggle to conceive what it will be like,” stated William MacAskill.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “We transform the world, but we don’t remember it. We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don’t recall what was there.To fix this problem, we must learn how to stay in touch with the past while continuing to move forward,” stated Daniel Pauly, legendary UBC fisheries scientist


    Every generation is handed a world that has been shaped by their predecessors – and then seemingly forgets that fact. In a short-but-influential paper published in 1995, legendary UBC fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly argued that this blind spot meant scientists were failing to account fully for the slow creep of disappearing species. Daniel Pauly coined this effect as the Shifting Baseline Syndrome. Since then, this has been observed far more widely than the fisheries community – it takes place in any realm of society where a baseline creeps imperceptibly over generations.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Now, with the Ecological Accounting Process as a foundation piece, local governments have a rationale and a metric to do business differently via multiple planning pathways to achieve the goal of natural asset management,” stated Kim Stephens, Partnership for Water Sustainability (June 2022)


    “EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, evolved as one ‘big idea’ led to the next one. We could not have made the leap directly from the first to the last. It required a building blocks process. This is the beneficial outcome of a systematic approach to applied research that tests and refines the methodology and metrics to get them right, and is founded on the principle of collaboration that benefits everyone. With the perspective of hindsight, each local government took a leap of faith that EAP would fit into their strategic directions,” stated Kim Stephens.

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    TO REVIVE A RIVER, RESTORE ITS LIVER: “A stream is a system. It includes not just the water coursing between the banks but the earth, life and water around and under it,” wrote Erica Gies (Scientific American, April 2022)


    “Across North America and the world, cities have bulldozed their waterways into submission. Seattle was as guilty as any until 1999, when the U.S. Department of the Interior listed Chinook salmon as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. That legally obligated the city to help the salmon when undertaking any new capital project that would affect the fish,” wrote Erica Gies. But restoration projects were failing because they were overlooking a little-known feature damaged by urbanization: the stream’s “gut.”

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