Vancouver faces barriers to green infrastructure implementation - SFU study

Vancouver struggles to implement green infrastructure at the rate of other major cities, according to a new Simon Fraser University study.

Led by SFU Resource and Environmental Management professor Andréanne Doyon, the study, published in Urban Water Journal, found that the City of Vancouver struggles to adopt green infrastructure (GI) due to political, organizational, educational, funding, ownership, and engagement barriers.

According to Doyon, political and financial obstacles placing Vancouver behind other municipalities include city council’s lack of consistent funding and support for GI initiatives, including its maintenance.

Doyon says the main organizational issue in Vancouver is that GI is situated within the city’s engineering department, which sometimes results in a lack of collaboration among the municipality’s various planning units. In terms of ownership, the City of Vancouver has minimal control over GI implemented in conjunction with private developments, so most GI projects have been on public land.

 “There is also a significant lack of engagement surrounding GI because most people simply don’t know about or understand it,” says Doyon.

To address these obstacles and encourage collaboration between neighbouring municipalities, Doyon recommends that the city create a knowledge sharing tool to distribute basic information about GI to departments across Vancouver and cities throughout the Lower Mainland. 

“This would address the internal lack of GI education within Vancouver and cities that surround it,” says Doyon.

“However, transformational changes will not occur until GI practitioners from across the province and country acknowledge the importance of various knowledge systems and work together to implement them.”

In recent years, the application of GI has risen as a means of environmental intervention that can address various urban environmental issues such as flooding and the urban island heat effect, leading to a global uptake in its policy, planning and literature. 

Although the City of Vancouver has been recognized for its commitment to climate action since the 1990s, it didn’t establish its GI branch until in 2016, placing its progress far behind that of many cities across Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the United States.

Definitions and examples of GI vary across Canada; however, the term entails organizations or services that are at least partially the responsibility of local municipalities, including transportation and water systems, building standards, and land use planning. 

In Vancouver, the city’s strategic green infrastructure plan, Rain City Strategy, concentrates primarily on rainwater management, with a goal of capturing and treating 90 per cent of the city’s annual rainfall. 

Vancouver uses the term green rainwater infrastructure  to refer to infrastructure built for the purpose of stormwater management, such as rain gardens, permeable pavements, and infiltration trenches.

“We tend to see intervention in parts of the cities when there is an opportunity, such as areas that are seeing new developments,” says Doyon. “However, some of the hottest neighbourhoods in Vancouver have the lowest rates of GI implementation.”

“But what if we took a city-wide approach instead and focused on the areas that need the most intervention?”

Doyon says that the implementation of green infrastructure should focus on equity instead, prioritizing areas such as the Downtown Eastside or Marpole. 

She recommends implementing a hybrid approach with new landscaping guidelines that also consider financial barriers. 

Doyon says that the implementation of new types of green infrastructure would also lead to many co-benefits, such as an increase in greenery and shrubs, and lower pollutant loads.