Written by Teghan Acres

“Vancouver is proudly surrounded by water. We see water and nature as a connector of community to our environment.”

These are Jimmy Zammar’s words from our February seminar on the City of Vancouver's One Water Journey. Over the past 18 months, the City of Vancouver has undergone a transformation in how it plans and manages water in all its forms to respond and adapt to climate change, to provide reliable services to their communities, to protect the environment and natural systems, and to embed water at the outset into city planning functions. To that end, the City created a division within Engineering (Integrated Strategy and Utility Planning – ISUP), a new city-wide approach (“One Water”) for integrated water resource management, and adopted the Water Sensitive Cities framework to guide their progress.

Zammar is the director of Integrated Strategy and Utility Planning within the City of Vancouver's Engineering Department. He is in charge of integrating holistic water resource planning and management across the City, and initiating a number of emerging practices including modelling, monitoring, and scaled deployment of nature-based solutions. In addition, Zammar oversees the City's neighbourhood energy utility, which uses sewage heat recovery to supply heat and hot water to neighbourhoods around Olympic Village and beyond.

Zammar’s experience covers federal, regional, and local governments, with international assignments in nine countries. His sector knowledge includes water and sanitation, integrated water resource management, nature-based solutions, climate adaptation, transportation, low-carbon district energy, hydro-electric infrastructure, and green building.

His seminar addressed the transformation that the City has undertaken to move from a traditional water management approach to an integrated and water-sensitive paradigm. The One Water Journey is critical to creating these transformations. Vancouver is facing, frequent sewer discharges into the ocean, increasingly polluted stormwater flows, heightened flooding risks, increased drought and heat waves, competing demands for water resources, and limited opportunities for effective water reuse.

The City is now considering integrated planning for all components of its water resources and services, including household water supply, rainwater, surface water, groundwater, and wastewater. Zammar explained that this approach requires the consideration of intergenerational equity, ecosystems and natural habitats, green infrastructure, nature-based assets, and adaptive solutions. Green infrastructure will be critical to rebuilding a natural water absorption system. Currently, as Zammar puts it, “our rain falls on a Gore-Tex layer [of pavement].” To achieve this objective, the City has built a custom planning process with the following components:

1. Understand the built environment, social layers, and natural environment.
2. Forecast population growth and redevelopment, water consumption trends, climate change, First Nations engagement & reconciliation, and changing regulations.
3. Develop a plan by asking how each element of the built environment can provide value beyond its first intended use (e.g. green roofs).
4. Optimize by using the City of Vancouver’s multi-objective decision assistance tool (MODA).
5. Implement by deploying green, grey, blue strategies that bring resilience, energy, water servicing, and biodiversity into the city while providing essential water supply to residents.

The City is entering the implementation phase of its One Water strategy while learning lessons from pioneering cities around the world such as Amsterdam and New York. The work done today will create a greener and more equitable future for the City’s residents.

The PWRC is continuing to host workshops and seminars virtually. Watch our social media channels at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram for announcements on how to register and get involved.

We respectfully acknowledge that the PWRC operates on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.