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Managing Natural Assets Alongside Engineered Ones Columbia, was doing to recognize its natural assets as core infrastructure. The Town of Gibsons, the Smart Prosperity Institute, the David Suzuki Foundation, and my own firm, Brooke and Associates, also realized the national potential of Gibsons’s work. From this realization, MNAI was born in 2015, and I have been working there ever since. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about MNAI.
Natural assets like wetlands can provide services like water storage and purification.
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sset management is a familiar concept for most local governments and water utility providers, but when they hear the term, almost everyone thinks about wastewater treatment plants, buried pipeline, and pump stations. The Municipal Natural Assets Initiative (MNAI), a Canadian nonprofit, is aiming to change that. MNAI’s core insight is that natural assets like wetlands, forests, and creeks provide tangible services for municipalities that are similar to those provided by engineered assets like retention ponds and culverts. By inventorying, analyzing, and maintaining their natural assets, local governments and utilities can make intelligent decisions about whether or not to build engineered assets and the wisdom of development that will interfere with these natural assets. In this interview, MNAI Executive Director Roy Brooke speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the concepts behind natural asset management and the results that communities have seen from putting it in practice. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF ROBERT JONES.
Roy Brooke: I spent much of the 1990s working in Ottawa as a political advisor, including to Canada’s environment minister. Then, I worked for the United Nations for about 9 years, based primarily in Geneva, Switzerland, and later in Kigali, Rwanda, working at the confluence of humanitarian affairs and environmental and climate change issues. Around 2011, after our child was born, we moved back to Canada. I became director of sustainability for the City of Victoria, British Columbia. Later, as a consultant, I became aware of the pioneering work that the Town of Gibsons, British
Roy Brooke: The core idea of MNAI’s work is that a natural asset, such as a forest, green space, wetland, or riparian area, can provide many of the same services that local governments would otherwise need to provide via an engineered asset. For example, a wetland can store water, purify water, and reduce downstream flooding in much the same way that engineered culverts and retention ponds could. However, most local governments, to the extent that they are thinking about natural assets at all, are thinking about them from a fairly narrow perspective: as social, recreational, cultural, or green amenities. All those aspects are important, but in seeing natural assets in that narrow manner, governments are failing to consider other core services for which they could be understanding, measuring, and managing their natural assets. Stated differently, there’s a gap between the potential of local natural assets and the way that most local governments are contemplating or conceptualizing them. So, there is a gap, and it matters for a number of reasons. In the United States and Canada, there are challenges related to aging and deteriorating infrastructure and delayed maintenance. Issues like climate change are making the situation considerably worse in many communities. What used to be a 100-year storm event may now happen several times in the same winter. Local governments need a different way to conceptualize and to deliver services. We’re finding that standard modern structured asset management processes provide a platform for thinking about natural asset management. That is because asset management, in its modern incarnation, which is derived from International Organization for Standardization standards, does not ask whether an agency needs a green asset or a grey asset. Instead, it asks what service the agency is trying to deliver sustainably, cost effectively, and reliably. To the extent that it can be demonstrated that natural assets provide a service reliably and cost effectively, they have a place within that asset management system, just like any engineered asset. The Town of Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, north of Vancouver, is a small community of about 4,000 people. It was one of the first local governments to stitch together the idea of modern asset management and ecosystem services. The members of the local government kind of backed
