How Vancouver is Protecting Itself From Future Flooding — With Plants
Sourced from Vancouver Is Awesome
Vancouver’s narrative over the past two decades has often hinged on densification — how to manage the rise of dull grey towers framed by distant green mountains.
But with every megaton of carbon dioxide belched into the atmosphere, the risk of rising seas and increasingly heavy rainfall has pushed the region toward letting more of that forest creep back into the city.
Known as “green infrastructure,” the idea is to simulate a natural water cycle wiped out from decades of city building. Besides the aesthetic benefits of more green space, positive spin-offs include mitigating flood levels, cleaning tainted rainwater for aquatic species and a general urban cooling effect that regulates temperatures at the height of summer.
“In the old days, it was 'scoop the water up and send it down these pipes.' Now, with climate change, we have to restore these old systems,” said Melina Scholefield, the City of Vancouver’s manager of green infrastructure implementation.
“That’s the whole paradigm shift.”
From Hope to Richmond, British Columbians have destroyed or buried at least 117 streams along the Lower Fraser River. Another 50 per cent of streams are endangered due to human activity, and many more have been channelized or diverted to make room for everything from farms and shopping malls to roads and condo towers.
That’s had massive implications for salmon. Between 1980 and 2014, the Fraser averaged 9.6 million sockeye returns annually, but the last two years saw some of the worst returns in the river’s history, bottoming out at 485,000 in 2019, the lowest since record-keeping began in 1893.
From the Living Architecture Academy
