How to Avoid Green Elephants: Green Infrastructure Asset Management for Good Governance and Resilience

Overview Green infrastructure (GI) is increasingly recognized as an effective strategy to manage stormwater, while also providing a wide range of additional co-benefits and services (including economic, environmental, physical and mental health, and social benefits). As municipalities face escalating pressures from population growth, aging infrastructure, degraded ecosystems, and climate change, they are turning to GI assets to meet these challenges. However, in order to fully realize these benefits, and to continue realizing them throughout their entire lifecycle, GI assets must be managed appropriately. As municipalities and utilities look to scale-up and operationalize their GI programs, they face challenges, such as: operations and maintenance of numerous and varied GI assets, implementing a scalable asset management program that integrates with existing assets, and ensuring the appropriate governance and management structures. A well-considered asset management program coupled with effective governance are crucial to ensuring that assets are not built and then forgotten, and that municipalities have the appropriate resources for the long-term management of both their existing assets and new assets as they come into service. GHD recently completed a Green Infrastructure Asset Management Program for the City of Vancouver, a first of its kind in Canada. The framework provides guidance for effectively managing existing GI, scaling up the implementation of new GI assets, and adapting to meet the related evolving governance and funding challenges. This Program is in support of the goals articulated in the City's Rain City Strategy, including maximizing the benefit from existing assets, significantly scaling up the number of assets that they manage, and to ensuring that the City is able to realize the anticipated return on the investment in GI. Background In 2019, the City of Vancouver's Mayor and Council formally adopted the Rain City Strategy (RCS), which articulates the aspirational goal of Vancouver becoming a Water Sensitive City. The three key goals of the RCS are to: (i) improve and protect Vancouver's water quality, (ii) increase Vancouver's resilience through sustainable water management, and (iii) enhance Vancouver's livability by improving natural and urban ecosystems. The RCS is forward looking and aspirational, aiming to achieve a paradigm shift in how water is managed by 2050, through a series of pragmatic steps. At the heart of the Rain City Strategy is a commitment to capture and clean a minimum of 90% of Vancouver's average annual rainfall volume (long term); and manage urban rainwater runoff from 40% of impervious areas in the city by 2050. Of this target, 30% will come from redevelopments, and the remaining 10% will be achieved through the implementation of strategic retrofits of impervious surfaces across the city. Therefore, by 2050, the Rain City Strategy is targeting 10% of all impervious surfaces citywide to be retrofitted in order for rainwater runoff to be managed by Green Rainwater Infrastructure (GRI) (also referred to as Green Infrastructure (GI)). To achieve this goal, the City forecasts that they will need to scale up from their current 283 to 10,000 GI assets by 2050-a significant increase. This ambitious target requires careful planning to ensure that the financial and human resources are available to maintain current GRI assets while substantially scaling up the number of GRI assets that the City owns and operates each year. As such, understanding the current and future asset lifecycle costs, is crucial. The ownership and accountability for these assets is another key consideration. In 2017, the City of Vancouver established the Green Infrastructure Implementation Branch (GII Branch). Prior to this date GI assets were designed, implemented and managed by 9 other Branches within the City. Following 2017, ownership of these legacy assets was transferred to the GII Branch. This temporal delineation is important as the majority of the City's current GRI asset portfolio were installed prior to the establishment of the GII Branch. The need to streamline operations and maintenance of these legacy assets, navigating relationships with the other Branches and the systems that those branches had put into place to manage assets highlights the governance challenges that the GII Branch was facing. GHD was engaged to gain an understanding of the current state of asset management in the City and to make recommendations to help the City staff overcome current challenges and scale their GI program as needed to meet the RCS goals. Methodology & Outcomes The financing, governing, monitoring, and maintaining current GRI assets is already complex within the City, and will become more so as the City scales up this initiative to satisfy the goals set within the Rain City Strategy. GHD worked with the GII Branch to gain a greater level of understanding about the legacy assets that they are now responsible for, and to support the GII Branch in developing a Green Infrastructure Asset Management Program that can be sustainably scaled (considering both and financial and human resource capacity). This process was undertaken through 5 key stages, asking: 1)What is the current context? 2)What needs to be delivered? 3)How should we deliver? 4)Who is accountable for delivery? 5)How do we pay for it? Based on this analysis, including lessons learned from peer cities, GHD proposed alternative service delivery models to help the GII Branch understand and rationalize service delivery needs against the City's long-term GI growth goals defined in the RCS, and the associated changes that the City would need to make to progress toward these future states. GHD also proposed 4 potential GI governance models that could be appropriate for the City, balancing leadership and accountability. Through discussions with the GII Branch leadership team, one governance model was selected, and the GHD team prepared final recommendations to move towards implementing that governance model. Finally, life-cycle cost projections were prepared, forecasting when more significant costs should be anticipated (such as those associated with necessary O&M or rehabilitation activities) over the lifecycle of current and future assets, allowing for sustainable long-term planning. Conclusions Green infrastructure asset management is an emerging practice within the discipline of asset management. GI assets are not yet included in asset management programs and plans as standard practice, and the ongoing management of assets over their full lifecycle, including responsibility for operations and maintenance, is often not considered when assets are constructed. The outcomes of the work that GHD undertook on behalf of the City of Vancouver will provide valuable lessons and examples for other municipalities and utilities as they increasingly look to GI assets to deliver important climate resilience and stormwater management benefits. Investments in infrastructure are long-term decisions-making the right choices today ensures that we are setting the stage for future generations to continue to have healthy, resilient, thriving communities. Well designed, well managed, well funded GI can help us create liveable communities today, and also to create the kind of future that we want.