On the ground, the trails are marked by culturally modified trees, circles carved into bark, proof of the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s history in this area. As we approached Caas Tl’aat Kwah (aka Serb Creek), a 15,054 hectare watershed that has not yet been logged or mined, the forest stitched together in a blanket of deep green, cleaved only by yellow-green wetlands threaded with glacial blue streams.

“We want to conserve it for future generations,” says Charlotte Euverman, the Wet’suwet’en woman leading a fight to save this area, which includes a traditional gathering and feasting site. “We have to leave them something.”

Like most First Nations here, the Wet’suwet’en never signed treaties with Canada or the province. Nevertheless, the latter took the land and leased forested areas to logging companies. Today just 20% of British Columbia’s old-growth forests remain. In 2020, after decades of activist pressure, the province released its Old Growth Strategic Review, a report that identified about a quarter of the remaining old growth as high risk for logging and recommended a pause while land-use decisions were made. Yet four years on, logging has been deferred in less than half of the high-risk area.

First Nations and an array of species have paid dearly for the wide-scale logging, and now some forestry experts say its effects are being felt farther afield too.

Scientists are finding that industrial logging can contribute to the intensity and frequency of forest fires because it dries out the land. In summer 2023, more than 150,000 square kilometres (58,000 square miles) burned across Canada, an all-time record, carrying smoke across the continent and air pollution all the way to Europe and China.

Despite promises from the province’s Ministry of Forests, environmental activists say that classic “talk and log” delay tactics continue. Independent analysis by the Wilderness Committee, Sierra Club BC and Stand.earth found that 50,000 to 100,000 hectares (123,000 to 247,000 acres) of the at-risk forests have been logged or approved for logging in British Columbia since the province’s 2020 report.

“With so little old growth left, it is crucial [for the province] to step up to the plate for watersheds like Serb Creek and offer nations every support needed for long-term solutions,” says Jens Wieting, senior forest and climate campaigner with Sierra Club BC.

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Before boarding the helicopter, de Wit leads us in a ceremony, inviting us to rub charcoal on our cheeks. It’s a sign to their ancestors that we’re coming with respect, he explains, acknowledging that they reside on the land and that alpine places are sacred. Because the area is not yet accessible by road, nation members Caroline Muir and Sandra Harris are seeing it for the first time.

After 30 minutes of flying, the pilot waggles the helicopter down, setting it upon a boggy meadow. As we step out, Muir takes a moment, eyes closed, hand on her heart. Harris stoops to examine the plants: low cedar (Diphasiastrum complanatum), Labrador tea (Ledum groenlandicum Oeder), frilly white bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata) flowers.

Harris’s great-grandfather and Muir’s great-uncle, Jack Joseph, had a cabin here. It’s gone now, but we follow de Wit through the trees to a newer cabin. He opens his backpack and pulls out a framed photo of Joseph and nails it to the wall in a place of pride.

Harris explains the significance of this moment for her. “We have a lot of stress in our lives with racism, working with colonial systems that are so unkind to our ways.” The land is healing, she says.

“Today, we can feel our ancestors. We remember our stories when we are able to put our feet on the land,” Harris says. “My spirit needs that . . . There’s lots of good medicine there for us.”

Where there’s logging, there’s fire

Canadian governments’ commitments to reconciliation with First Nations and to biodiversity conservation might lead the Ministry of Forests to spare some of the remaining old growth. But the rise in extreme fires does not appear to factor into its calculus, says Torrance Coste, associate director of the Wilderness Committee. The link between logging and fires is “absolutely not” acknowledged by the province, he says.

Yet Coste says that industry lobby groups use the threat of wildfire to argue for more logging, saying, “We need to log these areas so they don’t burn.” That argument is driven by the conventional wisdom that increased fire severity is due not just to climate change but also fire suppression that created “fuel loading” – dense growth.

The Ministry of Forests would not make someone available for an interview. But a spokesperson wrote in an email that their approach to reducing wildfire severity is thinning (some logging) and prescribed burns.

Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist for Wild Heritage, says that thinning forests reduces fire severity only in narrow circumstances. “It’s critical to leave large, fire-resistant trees in place,” he says, and not to remove too much of the forest canopy, which dries out plants and soil and allows winds to blow fires longer distances. Even if done right, benefits last only about a decade, he says, and thwart fire only when the weather isn’t too hot or dry.

Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington, says thinning can be a helpful step before prescribed burns in certain ecosystems, such as interior Douglas fir and ponderosa pine forests that Indigenous Peoples used to burn regularly. Outlawing the practice has led to overgrowth. Caas Tl’aat Kwah, on the other hand, contains interior cedar hemlock and Engelmann spruce subalpine fir ecosystems, with trees up to 350 years old. Prichard says thinning or prescribed burns in these types of forests would not reduce fire severity.

DellaSala and other scientists say that the focus on fuel loading and thinning fails to recognize the way in which industrial logging increases fire severity: it kills complex communities of life that stabilize the water cycle, leading to much drier landscapes.

One paper that DellaSala co-authored looked at the severity of 1,500 fires in Western U.S. states over 30 years and found that protected forests, with higher levels of biomass [plants] and fuel loading, actually had lower fire severity than intensively managed areas of commercial logging. Another from 2018 found that “intensive plantation forestry characterized by young forests and spatially homogenized fuels, rather than pre-fire biomass, were significant drivers of wildfire severity.” Another from 2022 found that clear-cutting was a key factor leading to “frequent, high-severity fire.”

Other studies suggest that old growth reduces fire severity by retaining moisture and helping to generate rain. In an intact forest, dense, layered canopies of multiple species slow rain when it falls, and roots provide pathways for water to move underground. From there, it filters into creeks, wetlands and rivers over weeks and months. As trees photosynthesize, they release water vapour into the air, forming clouds.

They also release particles of microbes and fungi that help vapour coalesce into rain. Their rough surfaces slow wind, keeping moisture in the area. Old trees transpire more water, even through the dry season, because their roots tap groundwater from deep below. This phenomenon, called hydraulic lift, also distributes water to seedlings and weaker trees through the soil and mycorrhizal networks, keeping the whole forest moist, says University of British Columbia forest ecologist Suzanne Simard, author of Finding the Mother Tree.

Damp soil, plant litter and woody debris are filled with living beings – fungi, microbes, insects and other animals – that hold on to water for a long time and “really help with fire resistance,” Simard says.

For example, wild forests can hold more than 10 times the species of mycorrhizal fungi than young plantations. Trees feed the fungi via their own photosynthesis. After clear-cutting, the few species that survive are not ones seen in old growth that are “big and fat and that really take up water and move it around the ecosystem,” Simard says.

Although British Columbia requires logging companies to replant after cutting, typically they install just a few marketable species. Deciduous trees such as maples, aspen and birch are less flammable; their stands create fire breaks in natural landscapes. But they are also less marketable, so standard operating practice is to kill their sprouts with herbicide, Simard says. Herbicides can also kill living matter in the soil, making it far less able to absorb water, contributing to drought and landslides.

These differences are obvious even to laypeople, Coste says. “The forest floor is spongy and, if you dug in your hands, would have moisture, whereas the cut blocks are crispy and dry,” he says. And the lack of shade and evaporative cooling means that “walking from a standing forest into a clear-cut, the temperature can go up 15 degrees.”

Harris has observed this too. “The soil health is a concern. Walking on our territory, it’s crunchy.” And water isn’t filtering underground as much: “We used to have springs to drink from. And those are drying up.”

A plan to save Caas Tl’aat Kwah

From the province’s perspective, Caas Tl’aat Kwah is the jurisdiction of British Columbia Timber Sales (BCTS), a commercial arm of the Ministry of Forests. Under the Old Growth Strategic Review, the Wet’suwet’en notified BCTS that they support a logging deferral, which the Ministry of Forests acknowledged in 2023.

BCTS had proposed a 10-kilometre (6.2-mile) road and logging in the area, which Sierra Club BC verified by accessing recent planning maps. But, the Ministry of Forests spokesperson wrote in an email, “Deferrals will remain in place until a long-term forest management approach is implemented.”

Wet’suwet’en Nation is composed of five clans, each made up of several houses. To the Wet’suwet’en, Caas Tl’aat Kwah is the jurisdiction of Kwen Bea Yex (House Beside the Fire) of the Laksilyu (Small Frog Clan). Euverman is a member of Kwen Bea Yex. Sitting above the rushing Bulkley River, cottonwood fluff drifting like snow, she explains her motivation to protect Caas Tl’aat Kwah from logging. “Coastal tailed frog is my biggest reason. The frog is on our crest,” she says.

A species of special concern under Canada’s Species at Risk Act, the frog is ancient. It is one of just two tailed frogs in the world and significantly different from other frogs. It doesn’t vocalize, and its “tail” is actually used for making more frogs. Other species that survive in the Caas Tl’aat Kwah watershed include wolverine, grizzly, wolf, mountain goat, moose, bull trout, cutthroat trout, Western red cedar, whitebark pine and arboreal lichen, which feed endangered caribou.

The frogs are “very sensitive to their surroundings being disturbed,” Euverman says, adding that noise prevents them from breeding. “They’re important, and so are all the other animals.” If BCTS goes against Wet’suwet’en desires to protect the watershed, “we’ll fight to the end to keep them out,” she says.

Wet’suwet’en played an outsized role in getting the province and Canada to engage with First Nations in land-use decisions. It was one of two nations to bring the precedent-setting 1997 case in which the Supreme Court of Canada acknowledged that First Nations have collective property rights and their oral histories are valid. However, the ruling didn’t actually grant nations property rights, leaving details vague. Canadian governments since have frequently delayed and dissembled.

In recent years, British Columbia and Canada have both passed into law the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). That requires colonial governments to engage in “free, prior and informed consent” with First Nations. However, Canadian and provincial governments do not give nations veto power over development projects within their territories. Wet’suwet’en activists experienced this firsthand: they waged a decade-long effort to prevent the Coastal GasLink pipeline from bifurcating their territory – and lost.

An uncertain future

Ultimately, BCTS could decide to log Caas Tl’aat Kwah. The spokesperson for the Ministry of Forests writes, “If the temporary deferral is lifted for areas within the Serb Creek watershed, BC Timber Sales will continue to work with First Nations, biologists, ecologists and other professionals to plan any potential future harvest [logging] in a way that would preserve the area’s biodiversity, wildlife, cultural values and recreational opportunities.”

Coste, with the Wilderness Committee, is skeptical. “The whole structure of government is built around the prioritization of timber and its extraction,” he says. “So, these other values, like conservation or protecting forests for cultural value . . . it’s hard to do.”

One of the most challenging aspects, Harris says, is that provincial rules change every couple of years, with each new government. In fact, British Columbia is holding an election in October, which could change priorities yet again. Wet’suwet’en laws, on the other hand, are unchanging; gifts from their ancestors and the Creator, Harris says: “Our stories help us learn our laws, what our responsibilities are. That doesn’t change.”

Wieting says he’s familiar with this issue. “We’ve seen countless examples in this province. A nation is successful at opposing logging, only to confront the same struggle a few years later – and sometimes losing that battle.”

Besides the old-growth program, Caas Tl’aat Kwah could be protected as a park or as part of a carbon-storage or biodiversity-conservation program.

But de Wit dismisses those approaches. “All those Western tools are the Western system realizing that they made a mistake. I wouldn’t say that they are the instrument for protection.”

Another possibility is a recent movement in which First Nations declare places Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas. But Wieting says, “We have not seen examples of colonial governments quickly respecting unilaterally declared Indigenous Protected Areas.”

Instead, de Wit wants Wet’suwet’en to protect it entirely according to its own governance traditions. That requires members of Kwen Bea Yex to decide that Caas Tl’aat Kwah is needed for cultural and ecological purposes and off-limits to commercial logging, he says. The house would then secure agreement from its clan followed by all the clans. Then they’d have a feast, which ratifies the agreement.

“The feast hall is the site of the Wet’suwet’en Parliament,” de Wit says.

The B.C. Supreme Court previously upheld Wet’suwet’en governance to prevent logging in another culturally important place.

Harris works on the nation’s watershed planning committee and is a member of Ginehklaiyex (House of Many Eyes), which is also part of Laksilyu Clan. “Serb Creek is of interest for the whole nation,” she says. “The houses support keeping it in a pristine state.”

Meanwhile, the fires continue. In August, 353 fires were burning across British Columbia, including a “wildfire of note” just outside of Witset, a Wet’suwet’en reserve. Racism and colonialism have left deep wounds, Harris says. But de Wit sounds an optimistic note, saying, “When we heal the land, we will heal the people.”

This article was published collaboratively with The Guardian. Reporting for this story was supported by the Science Media Centre of Canada and the Sitka Foundation.

The post Where old-growth forests are clear-cut, there’s fire appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Epic flooding has killed hundreds of people across Pakistan, India, South Africa, Germany, New York, Kentucky and British Columbia, Canada, in the last year. Intense droughts are parching landscapes and wilting crops across Texas, the U.S. West and the Horn of Africa. As these water extremes hit more and more people where they live, there’s a growing awareness that climate change is water change.

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Whales are particularly vulnerable to “fixed gear” fishing, in which traps set on the seafloor to catch crabs and lobsters are connected via ropes to buoys on the surface. In areas where fishing is dense, these hanging ropes create an obstacle course for whales and other animals, including leatherback and loggerhead turtles. Canadian waters also saw 80 humpback and 40 minke whale deaths last year, with entanglement as one of the main causes. Entanglement in fishing gear was the No. 1 cause of death for all large whales. On right whales’ migratory routes, calving and foraging areas along the East Coast of North America, from Georgia to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the whales must swim a gauntlet of an estimated one million vertical fishing ropes attached to crab and lobster traps.

The high death toll in 2017 was in part due to the right whales moving into new territory, where protections for them didn’t exist. In response to these deaths, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) put out an action plan in March of this year. Recommendations include slowing boats when whales are present, closing part of the gulf to snow crab fishing, looking for whales with airplane surveillance and underwater microphones, limiting the amount of rope that fishers can use, requiring fishers to report interactions with marine mammals, and testing new fishing technologies.

Some methods outlined by the DFO have been tried on the U.S. East Coast for years, said Tim Werner, senior scientist and director of the Consortium for Wildlife Bycatch Reduction at the New England Aquarium in Boston, yet whale entanglement deaths have nevertheless been steadily increasing since 2000.

Now researchers and fishers in Canada and  on the U.S. East Coast are testing “ropeless” fishing gear that has the potential to reduce bycatch and make it possible for fishers to avoid closures. One type of system holds the rope and buoy on the bottom, next to the trap, out of whales’ way. To retrieve the trap, a device releases the buoy and rope to the surface rope, either at a timed interval or by sending an acoustic signal to the device to open. Another system has no rope at all but rather a bag attached to the trap that can inflate and lift it – if the contents aren’t too heavy.

One company, Desert Star Systems, has been selling the first type of system to fishers in Australia since 2013. On a cool coastal summer day, I drive through sand dunes just north of Monterey, California, to Desert Star’s headquarters, a low-slung, no-frills concrete building, next to a small regional airport. I find CEO Marco Flagg on the floor with a fellow engineer, wrapping rope around a plastic colander to test an idea about improving their product.

Flagg, a friendly, open German immigrant, is optimistic that his invention can help to save the whales.

Acoustic release technologies have been available since the 1960s, but early models were expensive and unreliable, he said. Desert Star’s patented technology, called a fusible link, uses a jolt of electricity to melt a wire, releasing a lever that allows the buoy and rope to rise to the surface. To make this work in cold water, the heating must be very fast. “We do this by charging a capacitor first, which can deliver the stored charge very rapidly,” said Flagg. In two-thousandths of a second, the wire reaches 1,400 degrees Celsius and melts. The speed also limits the energy required, he said. “One set of four AA alkaline cells is enough for about 50 release cycles.”

Later we go down to a dock at Monterey Bay so Flagg can demonstrate the device. The trap splashes into the water and sinks. Flagg calls for it, broadcasting codes that identify himself and the equipment through a sonar transducer. The lever releases and the float bobs right up.

Desert Star’s market for this product has been primarily in Australia, where lobster fishers were losing gear to storms and ships cutting their lines and to other fishers poaching their traps.

In North America, acoustic releases haven’t been widely used, primarily due to cost. But with endangered species teetering on the brink, the perceived value of the gear may begin to change.

Other companies with varied technologies, some at early stages of development, include SubSea Sonics in El Cajon, California; Fiomarine in Tasmania, Australia; Sea Mammal Education Learning Technology Society, a nonprofit out of Washington state; and EdgeTech, based in Massachusetts.

EdgeTech, another company that already has commercial products, has a simple system, said Rob Morris, product line sales engineer for the firm. “There’s a high-torque motor that just turns a shaft and unwinds a screw,” he said. “And the screw falls away and the system releases, so there’s no lever or anything that could become entangled with biofouling.” The system has a 99 per cent success rate, Morris said.

SNOW CRABBERS TEST GEAR

Desert Star and EdgeTech ropeless fishing gear are being tested in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by the Acadian Crabbers Association, said the group’s director-general, Robert Haché. Ropeless technology “is not pie in the sky. It’s ready and easily adaptable to our fishery,” he said. Whether it’s affordable is another question.

Because of the price, “Having this system installed on 30,000 to 40,000 traps in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence at this time is totally unrealistic,” said Haché, adding that he hopes that economies of scale will bring the price down.

Flagg says the Desert Star device costs from US$755 to US$1,995, depending on quantity purchased. Because it has a life expectancy of “well over 10 years,” he estimates an annualized cost, with maintenance, of about $200 per year.

EdgeTech’s new system, developed with lobster fishers in the United States, will cost around US$4,000, Morris said. He also estimates a lifespan of 10 or more years for his device.

The fishers who use Desert Star devices in Australia find that it pays off, said Flagg, The cost of the device is “offset by savings due to reduced poaching, equipment loss to ship strikes, weather, and the like.”

In North America, the devices may allow fishers access to zones otherwise closed, “and thus realize very substantial savings in ship time compared to more distant, alternate grounds,” said Flagg.

Haché said that nearly 30 per cent of the snow crab fishing area was closed last spring, and that using ropeless technology just in those areas would be an advantage.

Werner from the New England Aquarium said he’s been impressed with the quick response and positive attitude from DFO and Canadian fishers toward solving the problem – something he doesn’t see as much at home in New England. That readiness to change could be because the Gulf of St. Lawrence snow crab fishery recently lost its marine stewardship certification due to the whale entanglement issue.

Whatever the motivation, Haché said his group’s primary interest in ropeless traps is “to coexist with the North Atlantic right whale. There’s no future for us unless we can accommodate this cohabitation.”

The post Sharing the seas appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Europe is not alone in exploiting this carbon loophole. The United States’ 6 per cent increase in domestic emissions since 1990 ticks up to a 15 per cent increase when trade is included, according to the online database Global Carbon Project. As of 2015 Canada’s emissions have increased 22 per cent over 1990 levels, but if imports are included, that increase jumps to 26 per cent.

“They’re kind of hiding the carbon,” said Matt Lewis, communications consultant for ClimateWorks and an author of the report. Globally, more than 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions escapes regulation because it is traded internationally.

Now, some forward-thinking governments in North America are beginning to close that loophole for one economic sector: industrial materials used in government-funded projects.

Take California

Last October, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Buy Clean California Act, possibly the world’s first legislative effort to address carbon emissions in the supply chain.

The law requires the state’s Department of General Services to set a maximum “acceptable lifecycle global warming potential” for different building materials, including steel, glass, insulation and certain types of pipes. Only products with embodied emissions below the threshold it sets can be considered for state-funded projects. The law takes effect in July 2019.

Setting baselines in this way allows the state to make big-picture comparisons among potential suppliers, said Rajinder Sahota, assistant chief of the industrial strategies division at the California Air Resources Board. Decision makers will be “looking at relative footprints across the contracts” submitted, she said.

Buy Clean California was championed by a surprising coalition of industrialists, environmentalists and labour. They were triggered to act when the new Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland, which opened in 2013, was built with steel from a carbon-intensive Chinese factory rather than cleaner steel from California. That decision had significant climate implications, according to testimony from the BlueGreen Alliance, a labour-environmentalist partnership. Local steel would have used 180,000 fewer tons of carbon dioxide, equal to taking 38,000 U.S. cars off the road for a year.

“If you measure and charge for carbon on your own domestic industries but not on imports, then your own industries are at a disadvantage,” said Phil Northcott, CEO of C-Change Labs, a Vancouver-based startup that develops greenhouse gas accounting and pricing software.

As general manager of a Gerdau Steel manufacturing facility in Rancho Cucamonga, California, Mark Olson lobbied hard for the Buy Clean California Act. Now, he’s managing two plants in Ontario and working with Canadian governments on similar programs. “There’s a cost to producing clean products. And as long as we’re all playing on the same level playing field, we’re OK with that cost,” said Olson. “It’s when we’re not… that it becomes very challenging for us.”

Because California spends about $10 billion (U.S.) a year on infrastructure projects – bridges, highways, government buildings, universities – this new law has the potential to shift markets, said Lewis of ClimateWorks. Manufacturers “don’t make a different factory for private sector and the public sector. So governments can leverage their purchasing power to achieve transformation across the industry.” California has done this successfully several times already, he said, pointing to renewable energy targets and efficiency standards for appliances, cars and buildings.

Washington state is considering a bill similar to California’s, said Ryan Zizzo, technical director of Zizzo Strategy, a Toronto-based consulting firm and author of a report on governments’ efforts to account for embodied carbon. Washington, though, is aiming to cover a wider swath of construction materials than California – including concrete, notably excluded from California’s law thanks to industry lobbying.

Europe leading, Canada following

Trained as an engineer, Zizzo was a green building LEED consultant in Canada for a decade before spending three years in Finland. There he was introduced to the idea of embodied carbon. Several European countries have policies to account for it when constructing new buildings, he said. Standouts include Switzerland, which requires lifecycle assessments for new government buildings and sets targets for embodied carbon for some types of buildings. And Sweden now requires large transportation infrastructure projects such as roads and rails to calculate and report embodied carbon, with incentives to reduce it.

By contrast, Zizzo says, as a LEED consultant in Canada, “I was working on the greenest buildings in the country, but no one was talking about embodied carbon or applying that to projects.”

That’s beginning to change now, he said, with policies such as the Treasury Board of Canada’s greening procurement program, Ontario’s Ministry of Infrastructure long-term infrastructure plan, British Columbia’s Ministry of Environment greening procurement program and Québec’s Wood Charter. But much in these policies is more or less voluntary at this time. The few requirements that exist apply to a very small proportion of the construction taking place.

Counting challenges

The policies of California and Europe require manufacturers to prove their products’ footprint with Environmental Product Declarations, or EPDs, which are certified by independent, third-party auditors who look at the lifecycle of individual materials and the types of energy sources used in manufacturing them. The lifecycle assessment requires adding up all the energy used in mining materials, manufacturing the product, shipping it and recycling or disposing of it at end of life.

These analyses are important because the same material can be made with different manufacturing processes that may have dramatically different carbon footprints. Consider steel, which caused 7 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2012. Making steel has traditionally been extremely energy intensive because coal is an ingredient and high heat is required in multiple steps. But increasingly, manufacturers are making steel from recycled scrap in electric arc furnaces, which can be 24 times more efficient. Also, manufacturing uses electricity, which is cleaner in California, where 36 per cent comes from renewables, 36 per cent from natural gas and just 4 per cent from coal, versus, say, China, where 26 per cent comes from renewables, 3 per cent from natural gas and 65 per cent from coal.

But when using materials from a place that doesn’t regulate carbon, data for that particular product may be unavailable. That leads project managers to fill in the blank with data from another jurisdiction, said Zizzo.

“The classic example is North American manufacturers and building designers using data from Europe,” he said. Because Europe regulates industrial emissions, facilities there have to report their actual emissions under the European carbon trading system. U.S. facilities do not. So “there’s a lot more data available for, say, how much carbon is in steel from Europe than from North America. But we very have different energy systems, we have very different energy policies,” he said, which can make the European data pretty inaccurate as a proxy for U.S. steel.

Some software programs use averages for materials that lack data, said C-Change Labs’ Northcott. “If you use an average for people who aren’t reporting, it means the bad actors get a free ride,” he said. “And we can’t afford to give people a free ride.” To counteract that pitfall, his software assumes a high value for carbon intensity for any material that is not declared. It’s an incentive to factories unregulated by their governments to declare their emissions, he said. “We assume that anyone who does not declare is one of the worst.”

Reliable data is also elusive because actual emissions are always changing, said Zizzo. Factories are upgraded, or the source of electricity in the mix changes. Monitoring emissions and updating the data must be an ongoing effort to ensure accuracy.

Despite these challenges, laws like Buy Clean California are a step toward helping jurisdictions that care about reducing their climate impact to regulate not just what they make, but also what they use.

Said Northcott: “We can only control what’s inside our borders and what we buy. But what we buy is an enormous power. And as long as we use that buying power in a nondiscriminatory way [so as not to draw the ire of the World Trade Organization] we can make carbon have value in China.”

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Wastewater treatment plants are energy hogs. A 2013 study by the Electric Power Research Institute and Water Research Foundation reported that they consumed about 30 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, or about 0.8 percent of the total electricity used in the United States. Wastewater treatment’s high energy footprint is ironic because the organic matter in wastewater contains up to five times as much energy as the treatment plants use, according to the American Biogas Council. Reducing treatment plants’ energy footprints through energy efficiency and using the currently wasted energy could save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite all that energy seemingly there for the taking, reducing the fossil fuel demand of treatment plants is challenging and requires myriad approaches. Around the world, the industry is experimenting with new technologies, evaluating them for not just energy benefits but also cost and unintended consequences, such as additional waste streams to be managed.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago – MWRD – has set a target to be energy neutral by 2023, following the lead of plants in the United Kingdom, Denmark and the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland, Calif., which has moved beyond net-zero energy to actually selling energy back to the grid. These innovators are using a variety of technologies to reduce the electricity they use through energy efficiency and to generate electricity onsite to offset what they do use.

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Bring the bubbles

Wastewater treatment in developed countries often involves four main steps: primary treatment, which separates solids from liquid waste; secondary treatment, in which bacteria break down dissolved waste that contains ammonia and other pollutants and remaining solids are separated from the treated liquid; an anaerobic step, in which solids from the primary and secondary steps are digested by microorganisms in a sealed tank without oxygen; and, finally, a disinfection phase.

Bacteria play a key role in breaking down our sewage and industrial wastewater by consuming organic pollutants and inorganic nutrients such as ammonia. But keeping them happy isn’t easy. They require particular conditions to thrive: optimal temperature, food and oxygen. Getting bacteria the oxygen they need accounts for one-quarter to more than half of the energy used by a wastewater treatment plant. So plant operators are focused on reducing energy use in this step to boost energy efficiency.

Traditional plants pump air into the tank where the bacteria do their work, diffusing it through small holes to create little oxygen bubbles the bacteria can easily access. This process wastes a lot of energy because most of the bubbles rise to the top and pop without the bacteria using them.

The industry has been trying to reduce this energy drain for decades. One of the most promising approaches is something called a membrane aerated biofilm reactor, or MABR.

Instead of forcing air into the bacteria tank, operators insert massive cubes full of porous membrane tubes. A blower moves low-pressure air into the tubes. Bacteria congregate on the outside of the tubes, sucking up the oxygen that passes through them and creating an oxygen concentration differential that helps more oxygen diffuse.

“Bacteria are actually demanding the oxygen and causing the gradient,” says Glenn Vicevic, executive of product management for General Electric’s Water & Process Technologies, which makes a version of the technology, ZeeLung, that MWRD tested at its O’Brien Water Reclamation Plant in Skokie, Illinois. GE estimates that, depending upon existing plant design and operation, ZeeLung is four times more energy efficient than conventional forced draft aeration.

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Boost from biogas

Capturing energy from waste in wastewater is now standard practice at large plants, which use tanks called anaerobic digesters or biogas digesters to break organic solids from the primary and secondary steps into methane gas and carbon dioxide. Bacteria do the work again, but this time without oxygen. The resulting methane can be captured and burned in a biogas engine to produce electricity and heat that can be used in the plant’s operation. Or it can be upgraded to natural gas quality and put into a pipeline.

Only 35 per cent of U.S. plants generate electricity from biogas, in part because most wastewater treatment facilities in the United States are relatively small. “In order to be cost effective, you have to be a fairly large facility, at least 5 million gallons a day of wastewater treatment,” says Virginia Lew, manager of the Energy Efficiency Research Office at the California Energy Commission.

Plants that do not produce enough gas to bother generating electricity often burn it off instead. Adding battery storage could allow them to store enough energy to make using it worthwhile, Lew says. “I think there’s going to be greater emphasis on trying to utilize as much biogas in the future as possible to offset any purchased electricity and to reduce their carbon footprint.”

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Ammonia breakdown

Another way MRWD is reducing its energy use is with a bacterium called anammox. Ammonia, a pollutant found in wastewater, has been challenging to neutralize in wastewater treatment. It is normally broken down by bacteria during the aeration process in secondary treatment but requires more energy to deal with it than any other pollutant. “Ammonia is your highest air demand in your aeration process,” says MWRD executive director David St. Pierre.

Krüger, a subsidiary of Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies, has trademarked a process called ANITA Mox to better deal with ammonia. It sells plastic carriers that looks a little like Honeycomb cereal, with myriad surfaces to host anammox and ammonia-oxidizing bacteria. Both types of bacteria are needed to remove most of the ammonia — about 80 to 85 per cent. MWRD is using the ANITA Mox to break down ammonia in liquid sludge before putting it into the aeration step.

“If you can break down that ammonia in an anaerobic process, your demand for air significantly decreases,” says St. Pierre. “It has the promise to reduce your electrical uses by 60 per cent in your plant. So it’s huge.”

MWRD was inspired by Marselisborg Wastewater Treatment Plant in Denmark, says St. Pierre, which in 2015 was able to generate 153 per cent of the energy it used, thanks to ANITA Mox and other efficiency measures as well as biogas generation. ANITA Mox is also being used at another plant in Denmark; two in Sweden; and in Newport News, Virginia; and Durham, North Carolina.

Combined with other energy generation efforts, including solar panels on one plant, MWRD expects to soon be generating 90 percent of the energy it uses.

“We’re trying to shift from running a waste plant to a resource recovery facility,” St. Pierre says.

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Now government agencies are taking that idea to the next level by proactively encouraging investment in renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects. Called green banks, they are not banks as we typically think of them. They do not accept deposits from individuals, and they aren’t private institutions. Instead, green banks are government run and aim to leverage limited public funds by attracting private capital to these projects.

They “are really more like public financing authorities, pulling in as much private finance as possible,” says Rob Youngs, program director for the Coalition for Green Capital, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to establish green banks. “Generally they’re capitalized with public dollars from a variety of sources: taxes, cap-and-trade revenue, a rider on utility bills.” But they have greater reach than typical government subsidies, says Youngs, which are spent and then depleted. Because green banks are using government money primarily to make loans, rather than grants, the money is effectively recycled when loans are repaid, he said.

By offering financing or reducing the cost of financing, green banks can attract private investment to clean energy, sometimes achieving a 10:1 ratio of private-to-public dollars, Youngs said. This leverage is critical because, although the world invested a record US$286 billion in renewable energy in 2015, that investment must be doubled by 2020 and tripled in the 2020s to meet international objectives laid out in the 2015 Paris agreement, according to a recent report by the International Renewable Energy Agency. The lion’s share of that investment must come from the private sector, the report concluded.

Green banks are a growing global movement. At the Paris COP21 talks in December 2015, the Green Bank Network made its worldwide debut. Youngs’ Coalition for Green Capital was behind it, along with the Natural Resource Defense Council and early examples of these public financing authorities, including Connecticut Green Bank, New York’s NY Green Bank, UK Green Investment Bank, Australia’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Japan Green Fund and Malaysia’s Green Technology Financing Scheme. The goal of the new organization is to share best practices for clean energy financing, sort of an “open source banking” model.

It will amplify internationally the work begun at the Coalition for Green Capital, which has been involved with legislative proposals for a U.S. national green bank in 2009, 2014 and, most recently, July of this year. The latest House of Representatives bill, the United States Green Bank Act of 2016, would create a national green bank to fund state green banks. While this attempt may again fail to become law, “I think it is important to keep the conversation going,” said Youngs.

The original green banks

These new financing authorities can be seen as a continuation of an earlier movement, confusingly also called green banking. It dates back to at least 1980 with the founding of Triodos Bank in the Netherlands. Unlike the government financing authorities, these earlier green banks are actually banks: private institutions where individual people can have chequing and savings accounts. What sets them apart from traditional banks is that they only make loans to companies and individuals that meet charter values, such as environmental sustainability or strengthening the local community. They include at least 10 banks in the United States and Canada, including Vancity in Vancouver and New Resource Bank in San Francisco.

The 2008 financial crisis spurred three early green banks, including Triodos Bank, ShoreBank in Chicago and Brac Bank in Bangladesh, to form the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV) to promote their banking model. “They thought, ‘Wow, if all the other banks had banked the way we do, we probably wouldn’t have had a financial crisis,’” said Marc Eguiguren, secretary director of the alliance. “It’s time for us to raise our voice and tell the world there’s a different way.”

That way, according to Eguiguren, is centred on key principles, including transparency; a triple-bottom-line approach that values people, planet and profit; attentive monitoring to avoid being sucked into banking industry disruptions like the 2008 crash; and “only financing the real economy,” he said, meaning no derivatives, hedge funds or other money machinations.

Based in the Netherlands, the GABV now includes 36 financial institutions operating in countries on all six populated continents. They serve 25 million customers, hold US$110 billion in combined assets and employ 42,000 people.

Strategy: risk reduction

For the new green banks, risk reduction is a core strategy. Although renewable energy investment hit new highs in 2015, green infrastructure projects still have barriers that limit private investment.

For example, despite a rapid fall in the cost of wind and solar technology over the last several years, up-front costs still tend to be higher than conventional options because “weak environmental policies fail to sufficiently price pollution,” said Youngs. Private investors also tend to be less familiar with renewable options and lack reliable information about them.

These factors add up to perceived risk, which often translates into higher interest rates for up-front capital investments.

The new green banks provide project information to potential investors and use various financial tools to mitigate risk. These include putting up extra collateral for a loan, becoming cornerstone investors by committing to buy a defined block of stock, or aggregating a number of small projects together in a single investment to make it more attractive to private investors. “Because of the cost of underwriting, it would be expensive to underwrite a bunch of $500,000 projects,” said Youngs. “But if the project is $50 million, it’s more attractive.”

By reducing risk, green banks can help renewable energy projects get low-interest financing, thus reducing the up-front cost. Green banks are able to go where traditional banks fear to tread because “money from the government is not beholden to the fiduciary requirements of private investors,” said Youngs. “They can go into an area where there’s little track record.”

In Canada, Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change is working to create a green bank funded by the province’s cap-and-trade program, part of its Climate Change Action Plan. Details are being ironed out in preparation for its 2017 rollout, said Gary Wheeler, spokesperson for the ministry. Because emissions from buildings make up 24 per cent of Ontario’s greenhouse gas pollution, the bank will invest in energy-efficiency projects for buildings, according to the action plan. These include replacing gas boilers, electric baseboard heaters and oil furnaces with solar panels, air-source heat pumps, geothermal systems, vehicle-to-grid energy systems and energy storage systems.

The bank plans to provide grants or other incentives to homeowners for energy-efficient home improvements and may, in some circumstances, provide or help secure financing, said Wheeler. The bank will also make financing affordable for commercial and industrial projects, primarily by aggregating projects to reduce risk. Cap-and-trade revenues will provide the bank’s capital, which the ministry estimates will be funded at C$1.8 billion to $2.3 billion, or approximately 25 per cent of the total estimated value of the cap-and-trade market, said Wheeler.

Ontario’s bank will join growing ranks around the world. In addition to the six that founded Green Bank Network, Switzerland now has a green bank, as well as Hawaii, California, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Montgomery County in Maryland and Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates.

That momentum is likely due to the fact that the public financing authority model resonates with political animals of various stripes, said Youngs. “They have components that a lot of people can get behind, like efficient government, lowering energy costs for consumers, and increasing the amount of private sector activity in renewable energy.”

The post A different kind of bank appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Beginning in 1995 and extending until 2012, the drought stretched Australia’s water resources to the limit. State and local officials were hesitant at first, but were forced to act as water flows dropped and aquifers began to run dry.

“There’s nothing like a crisis to drive interest in a reform,” said Mike Young, who speaks from experience. The professor of environmental and water policy at the University of Adelaide has been a leader in Australia’s water reform movement since the 1990s.

When the rains finally returned in 2011, Australia had achieved a radical overhaul of its water policy, with significant set-asides for the environment and the world’s largest water market, totalling $3 billion in Australian dollars by 2009-10 (US$2.13 billion).

Nevertheless, it had been a series of water shortages over decades that had spurred Australia down the path toward reform. “Water markets in Australia are at least a 30-year ‘overnight’ success,” said Dustin Garrick, a professor of water policy at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

The current market gives people the flexibility to both put their water to the best economic use and to conserve, Young said. “Price trends are up – both utility customers and agricultural users are paying more for water – while overall consumption is down.”

This transition was anything but smooth and required a lot of experimentation, said Young. “We were the first country to convert from an old system to one designed for the future,” he said. “Australia made many serious mistakes.”

Now other countries are looking to Australia’s example, as climate change makes water supplies more erratic and population growth generates ever-increasing demand.

Young is currently working with a number of other water-stressed countries, hoping to help them sidestep some of Australia’s false starts.

Roots of success

The seeds of Australia’s water reform were planted back in the 1880s when the then-colony of Victoria, spurred on by an earlier drought, passed an act that established crown ownership of surface water. It used this power to then allocate water to farmers and cities. The rest of the continent soon followed suit. Because the states owned the water, they had the capacity to change the allocation system without having to engage in myriad legal disputes.

Decades later, water shortages inspired a shift from water entitlements based on area of land irrigated to ones built around volumetric quantity. Separating water from land titles in this way gave water a value unto itself, eventually opening the door for it to be traded.

By the 1990s, it was clear that the Murray-Darling Basin, which grows one-third of the country’s food supply and accounts for 70 per cent of its irrigated land area, was suffering. Water was overallocated, and water quality was declining from salinity and nutrient pollution. In 1995 the federal government set a cap on the total amount of surface water that could be extracted from the Murray-Darling Basin for agriculture, effectively kickstarting a cap-and-trade system.

“At that point, water became more scarce, and trading started to take off,” said Quentin Grafton, director of the Centre for Water Economics, Environment and Policy at Australian National University.

Flexibility

A key innovation was unbundling a grower’s entitlement, a permanent certificate to a water share, from the allotment – the actual volume of water they would get in a given month. The latter was decided by the government, based on the amount of water in the reservoirs. “Everyone has a share of water [rather than a guaranteed volume], so if there’s a drought, everyone has less,” said Jamie Pittock, an associate professor of environmental policy at Australian National University.

Now people had a choice: They could continue to sell their allocations on the temporary market, or they could sell all or part of their entitlements on the permanent market.

By making water trading more flexible, including allowing sales across state lines, water could flow to higher-value uses. For example, farmers with annual crops like rice could sell water in dry times to farmers with permanent crops such as orchards.

Measuring water was also critical to the market’s success, so the government invested $500 million in water meters and monitoring, said Grafton. It also set up water-rights registers and water accounting systems that gave the market a dose of needed transparency.

Still, as the Millennium Drought wore on, the Murray-Darling river system was once again at the brink of collapse. “It didn’t flow to the sea and had to be dredged for five or six years,” said Grafton. It was obvious that the first cap on extraction hadn’t managed to retain enough water during extreme drought.

“We made many water accounting mistakes,” acknowledged Young. “We gave too large a share to consumptive users.”

In 2012, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan shifted more water to the environment by reclaiming some water from irrigators. The federal government spent $3 billion to purchase entitlements from willing sellers and another $6 billion on subsidies for irrigators to upgrade infrastructure, such as drip irrigation or lining canals, in exchange for the entitlement to half the amount of water they saved, said Grafton.

The latter strategy softened the blow for farmers but risks making the system too inflexible in the future, said Pittock. “It’s gold plating irrigation infrastructure that may not be viable for the long term in regards to climate change,” he said.

Even with this reallocation, there’s still not enough water for the environment, said Pittock, pointing to Murray River’s ongoing struggle to flow to the sea and the challenging task set for environmental managers to craft an ecosystem that requires less water. “It’s a triage program,” he said.

Irrigators are anxious too, left wondering when they’ll be asked to give up even more water, said Tom Chesson, CEO of the National Irrigators’ Council in Canberra. Although individual irrigators aren’t forced to sell, when they choose to do so, it impacts whole communities, he said, as supporting businesses close, leading to economic and social decline.

Also unhappy are activists for indigenous people, whose water rights and needs have been routinely overlooked or marginalized, according to a 2013 paper by Queensland-based researchers in the Environmental and Planning Law Journal.

“Inside Australia, they tend to focus on 10 per cent that went wrong, rather than 90 per cent that went right,” said Garrick, who travelled to Australia on a Fulbright scholarship to observe negotiations for the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. “Internationally, the amount of water that’s been recovered for the environment, the percentage of historic water use that’s been reduced, is almost unprecedented. We’re talking about very important outcomes.”

Passing it on

The world has taken note. California lawmakers went to Australia this fall to gather tips on how to better survive drought. Chinese and Indian contingents have visited as well, said Grafton. Young held a temporary position at Harvard last year to work on exporting Australia’s hard-won wisdom to other water-strapped places, including the United Kingdom and western United States.

A critical lesson, say the experts, is that Australia’s market is far from free. “Markets are the servants of sound governance, not the masters,” said Garrick. Critical to the market’s success are its foundation of stable institutions, clearly defined laws and open political discourse when adjustments are needed.

Young recently published a blueprint for the western United States to transition to a similar system, and two water basins in Nevada are doing pilots. He said he hopes that success in these basins will convince other governments in the United States that the approach can work in North America. “It’s going to be a journey that will take some time, as it did in Australia,” he said.

Chesson’s view is darker, representing as he does a group that has been asked to do more with less. “I suspect it doesn’t matter what system you embrace,” he said. “People will always argue about water when there isn’t enough of it. Without [it], you’re buggered.”

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Memorial Day barbecues and parades were thwarted this year in Houston when a massive storm dumped more than 10 inches of rain in two days, creating a Waterworld of flooded freeways, cars, houses and businesses, leaving several people dead and hundreds in need of rescue.

But it was a predictable disaster. That’s because, thanks to a pro-development bent, the magnitude of stormwater runoff has increased dramatically as Houston has sprawled across 600 or so square miles of mud plain veined with rivers, sealing under asphalt the floodplains and adjoining prairies that once absorbed seasonal torrential rains and planting development in harm’s way. Land subsidence from groundwater pumping and oil and gas development and, now, sea level rise and more frequent and severe storms are applying additional pressure from Galveston Bay, which sits just east of the city of 2.2 million.

The good news? Houston had already begun shifting gears, hoping to reduce the severity of future floods by reclaiming 183 miles of natural waterways that snake through the city and 4,000 acres of adjacent green space from industrial areas through a project known as the Bayou Greenways. The goal is to absorb rain where it falls, reducing the volume rushing into stormwater detention facilities, and to encourage biking and walking as “active transit” in the parks that make up the Bayou Greenways.

With these measures, Houston is beginning to embrace a worldwide trend in urban retrofitting — layering new infrastructure on top of old to help cities weather climate change. In many places, that includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions: shifting to cleaner energy, making buildings more efficient and improving public transit. For cities facing increased threats from floods and droughts, it also means adapting to a changing world by finding new ways to manage water.

Resilient and economically beneficial

The Memorial Day flood led Houston to postpone its planned celebration of the new Buffalo Bayou Park, a piece of Bayou Greenways. The flood was something of a test: While much of the city suffered because of the floodwaters the park passed with flying colors, acting as a stormwater channel while park infrastructure weathered the deluge as intended, Anne Olson, president of the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, a nonprofit organization focused on redeveloping and restoring the bayou, told a local news site.

Such water management projects can pay economic dividends to cities, says Henk Ovink, a Dutchman who was recently appointed by Dutch government ministers as the first special envoy for international water affairs for the Netherlands. Having danced with the sea and four river deltas for nearly a millennium, the Netherlands has created something of a cottage industry imparting hard-won water management wisdom to other countries — among them, the United States, the Philippines, Japan, Colombia, Vietnam, Korea, Bangladesh, France and Guyana.

Ovink points to the economic benefits reaped by London’s Docklands redevelopment project and Essen, Germany, which was recently dubbed European Green Capital for 2017 for remediating derelict coal industry areas with green infrastructure that enhances nature and biodiversity. Essen has built green and blue corridors and taken steps to address climate change, air quality, waste management and energy as it moves to a services and financial center economy.

“Waterfronts are turning communities’ faces back to the water as they become great urban places, parks, public amenities,” Ovink says. That in turn attracts new businesses by making it easier to hire good employees, which is a big part of Houston’s motivation, says Michael Bloom, manager of sustainability practice at R.G. Miller Engineers, a Houston-based civil engineering firm.

The extent to which cities are making natural infrastructure an integral part of their water management plans is new, says Katie Arkema, senior scientist at the Natural Capital Project, an early proponent of resilient infrastructure. Around the world — from Melbourne, Australia, to China’s “sponge cities” to coastal cities in New Jersey and Belize — urban planners are formally expanding natural stream and wetlands hydrology and ecosystems such as dunes, mangrove forests and coral reefs to better protect communities. Last fall the White House explicitly backed natural infrastructure as a tool to boost climate resilience.

“Natural” or “green” infrastructure tends to be more resilient to water stress than human-engineered infrastructure because it’s flexible; it bends, rather than breaks. The goal is to create a system that “functions as a living organism,” says Tony Wong, an early advocate of green infrastructure and founder and CEO of the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities, which has hubs in three Australian cities, including Melbourne. Green infrastructure “mimics the functions of forests and wetlands and open spaces to serve and cleanse our cities,” he says.

It’s a reversal from the 20th century model that collected rain in detention tanks and lined rivers with concrete to move water away from built infrastructure as quickly as possible. That approach cut off rivers from their floodplains, raising water levels. And because concrete systems don’t flex, when they were inundated disaster struck.

As more cities formally embrace green infrastructure in their planning, it can be hard to remember how radical it seemed just a few years ago. In fact, in Houston, despite the Bayou Greenways project, it’s still pretty radical, says Bloom, who is active in local groups focused on water sustainability. Given Texas’ anti-regulation culture, “I can’t be too outlandish, but I do try to move the needle forward,” he says. He encourages developers to build swales swathed in native grasses as an alternative to concrete stormwater detention cisterns. One colleague dubbed them “beautiful ditches,” Bloom says, and their popularity is growing because they “add landscape attraction and usually cost less.”

Floods and drought

Meanwhile, Wong’s home city of Melbourne has a complex challenge — one with which more cities are beginning to grapple. Even though it sometimes floods, Melbourne also suffers from the severe droughts that frequently plague Australia.

Like several other cities in Australia, Melbourne built a desalination plant in response to the recent 11-year drought. However, the facility is energy intensive and the water it produces is expensive, so it has sat idle since it was completed because the drought broke soon afterward, meaning cheaper, less energy-intensive sources of water were once again available.

But one approach can solve both drought and flooding, says Wong.

“If you look at the water balance in many of our cities, you will realize that the combined amount of stormwater … plus the wastewater, the sewage water, are in fact more than the water that our cities consume,” he says. By creating wetlands among buildings, expanding community gardens and urban orchards in public spaces, using gray water to water landscapes and flush toilets, Melbourne can reduce its dependence on dams and desalination plants to supply itself with the water it needs in dry times, he says.

Urban kidneys

Taking steps to restore a city’s natural hydrology can also clean polluted water. Many cities on the U.S. East Coast and Great Lakes were built with a combined sewer system. Stormwater is routed through the sewage treatment plant to clean it before releasing it into nearby rivers. It sounds like a good idea, but these systems are regularly overwhelmed during big storms — meaning that untreated sewage overflows into rivers.

While some cities have replaced combined systems with separate “gray” stormwater infrastructure to reduce the number of combined sewer overflow incidents, others, such as Philadelphia, are using green infrastructure to absorb more stormwater where it falls — which can be a cheaper way of dealing with the problem. Philadelphia reclaimed land along the banks of local creeks and rivers and built parks that can flood when necessary. That reduces the amount of water entering the sewage system during storms and also cleans it via the ground’s natural filtration. This Green City, Clean Waters initiative, begun in 2011, also gives incentives to private landowners to open natural water pathways with street tree wells, planted “bumpouts” in sidewalks, rain gardens, green roofs, urban agriculture and even porous pavement.

Such features act as “the kidneys of our city that filter the stormwater that carries all the urban pollution every time it rains,” says Wong, adding that they also beautify cities and enhance their microclimates. Wetlands and native grasses in Houston’s Bayou Greenways project are expected to filter 2 billion gallons of runoff annually, saving US$1.3 million in treatment costs, according to a report to the Houston Parks Board.

Hurricane response

Seaside, enhancing natural ecosystems can also be cost-effective and deliver ancillary benefits. After Hurricane Sandy, the Rebuilding Task Force asked for input from Ovink, then deputy director general of the Dutch Department of Spatial Planning and Water Affairs. Ovink set up a competition called Rebuild by Design to inspire innovative rebuilding solutions. Green infrastructure was a critical goal of the competition, and a final task force recommendation was to build up and protect existing ecosystems, such as sand dunes. Now New Jersey is working to close the gaps between dunes in a massive sand dune restoration effort to protect homes. Although not everyone is on board, many local homeowners see the benefits. “People are saying, ‘I’d rather lose my view and have a big dune to protect my home,’” says Arkema.

Sometimes neither built infrastructure nor natural ecosystem enhancement can do the job, however, and the best solution is to withdraw from the shoreline entirely. Unfortunately, disasters are the quickest way to convince property owners to relocate. Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 killed 22 people and damaged 73,000 Houston-area homes, causing US$5 billion in property damage. The disaster prompted the Harris County Flood Control District to use money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to buy out the hardest-hit homeowners, removing the structures from future harm’s way.

Community engagement

But dialogue and community engagement can sometimes work ahead of disaster. The Dutch recognized the importance of collaboration in water management way back in the 1100s, Ovink says, because if a farmer built levees around his house, the water would then inundate neighbors. “Our democracy started as a water democracy with regional water authorities, even before we were a kingdom,” he says.

A near-disaster can also spur change, says Ovink. Rising waters in the Dutch rivers Rijn, Maas and Waal in 1995 forced 250,000 people to evacuate. Although the waters eventually receded without flooding the towns, “it raised the awareness of how vulnerable our riverine system was,” Ovink says.

In response, the government created a national program called Room for the River. “This really meant making more room for the rivers, giving up the land and asking people to move,” says Ovink. Farmers were asked to give up land that had been in their families for generations. “This was not the government coming in and telling you, ‘You have to leave your houses,’” he says. “The government said, ‘These are the risks, here are some possible solutions. … We have to make room for the water.’”

Communities across the region came together to discuss the problem with experts and officials and ultimately agreed on solutions. “Instead of only building higher dams and dikes, we increased the capacity of our delta,” says Ovink, by pushing back dikes and widening floodplains. Some farmers were persuaded to give up their land; others agreed to let their land flood if necessary — after evacuating their cattle to higher ground. “It was a marriage between two interests: safety and community,” says Ovink.

Informed dialogue works, agrees Arkema. In Belize, the Natural Capital Project met with local communities to identify their priorities: storm protection, a healthy lobster fishery and tourism, which also benefits from healthy coastal ecosystems. The agreed-upon national plan allowed for some development — for example, new resorts to boost tourism — but “done in a way that didn’t jeopardize protective ecosystems,” Arkema says.

It’s important to understand, however, that there’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution. “Cites are unique — built upon varied habitat with different weather patterns, economies and social values,” Arkema says. Interdisciplinary science and community engagement helps cities figure out what approach works best where.

A mental shift into the 21st century, which is going to continue to look very different than what we’ve known, also helps. The key, says Ovink, is to “try to live with water instead of fight it.”

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