Planning for sustainability in Southern Ontario
| In 2007, the ECO undertook an examination of the challenge of creating sustainable communities in southern Ontario. The following articles are included: | |
Contents |
Introduction: Accommodating economic growth
Southern Ontario is one of the fastest growing regions in North America. The area is already home to 94 per cent of the province’s population (or 36 per cent of Canada’s population of 32.8 million people) and the government projects that, by 2031, an additional four million people will settle in the Greater Golden Horseshoe (the GGH is an area in Southern Ontario, extending roughly from Niagara Falls to Georgian Bay to Peterborough). This rate of growth is unprecedented in Ontario; the anticipated increase is equivalent to creating a mid-sized city roughly the size of Kitchener every year for the next 24 years.
To cope with the projected population and economic growth in Southern Ontario over the next few decades, the Ontario government established the Ministry of Public Infrastructure and Renewal(MPIR) in late 2003 and enacted the Places to Grow Act (PGA) in 2005 so that planning could “occur in a rational and strategic way.” Under the PGA, MPIR was required to prepare a Growth Plan (GGH Plan) in 2006 for the GGH. The GGH Plan is a framework that establishes specific density targets and planning priorities for managing growth in the region.
In addition, the province has invested significant energy in the development of related legislation, plans, policies and guidelines aimed at striking a balance between the rapid growth of human communities and the need to protect important resources and features, such as Southern Ontario’s natural areas, source water and agricultural lands. Complementary to the PGA and the GGH Plan are the Greenbelt Act and Plan, also established in 2005. The interrelated Acts and plans are intended to promote more compact, sustainable urban communities, in order to curb sprawl-style development and reinforce efforts within the Greenbelt Plan area to preserve agricultural lands and natural heritage areas, and moderate growth in rural communities. Associated planning reform initiatives are also designed to provide the tools needed to promote more sustainable community development and protect natural features and functions: these initiatives include the new Provincial Policy Statement introduced in 2005 (2005 PPS), the 2006 Building Code, the Clean Water Act, and the amendments to the Planning Act contained in Bill 51. Some of these initiatives are summarized here.
The threat of irreconcilable priorities
While the province’s efforts to date are laudable, the ECO believes it is now timely to take a step back and evaluate whether these efforts will achieve the intended goals of ecosystem protection and the creation of truly sustainable urban communities in Southern Ontario. The risks to environment and quality of life over the long-term will be great if these planning efforts should fail.
The ECO’s own preliminary evaluations suggest that serious conflicts – described here as ‘irreconcilable priorities’ – are inherent in the province’s plans for balancing growth and ecosystem sustainability. Some priorities that reinforce unsustainable approaches to community development in Southern Ontario remain ingrained and unchallenged in recent provincial initiatives, trumping priorities and options that would more effectively promote ecosystem and community sustainability.
This section of our report explores in greater depth several areas where irreconcilable priorities already are creating conflicts, or are likely to generate future clashes, between the growth of human communities and the goal of ecosystem sustainability. Our analysis shows that sustainability must become the key overriding principle in guiding efforts to accommodate the human population increases projected for Southern Ontario.
Four topics involving irreconcilable priorities are explored:
- Living sustainably within a watershed, OR Pushing beyond natural limits?
- Creating a sustainable transportation system, OR Paving over the landscape?
- Protecting wetlands, OR Draining for development?
- Preserving natural areas, OR Extracting aggregates wherever they lay?
In addition, two profiles describe the efforts undertaken elsewhere to embrace truly sustainable approaches to community development and functioning. Short case studies of Dockside Green in Victoria, British Columbia, and Amory Lovins’ soft path concept for water conservation are put forward as food for thought.
Sustainability principles and ecological footprints
In the late 1980s, the Brundtland Commission, also known as the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), defined sustainable development as that which
- "… meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
The Commission elaborated on its definition by explaining that
- “sustainable global development requires that those who are more affluent adopt life-styles within the planet’s ecological means – in their use of energy, for instance."
Further,
- “…sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem.”
In the past two decades, other groups have sought to translate the Brundtland Commission’s definitions into practical rules to guide development. For example, in 1989 the Ontario Round Table on Environment and Economy (ORTEE) devised a useful set of sustainable development principles:
Ontario Round Table on Environment and Economy (ORTEE) Sustainable Development Principles
1. Anticipating and preventing problems are better than trying to react and fix them after they occur. 2. Accounting must reflect all long-term environmental and economic costs, not just those of the current market. 3. The best decisions are those based on sound, accurate, and up-to-date information. 4. We must live off the interest our environment provides and not destroy its capital base. 5. The quality of social and economic development must take precedence over quantity. 6. We must respect nature and the rights of future generations.
Particularly pertinent to our analysis is ORTEE’s Principle Four: “We must live off the interest our environment provides and not destroy its capital base.” This principle emphasizes the fact that there are limits to growth, imposed by the reality of ecosystem-specific resource constraints. Further, these limits must be taken into account in order to achieve and maintain a sustainable state as the human community evolves and grows.
Measuring ecological footprints
Along with sustainability principles, another important concept or tool for evaluating the sustainability of individual communities is the ecological footprint (EF). Developed by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in the mid-1990s, an ecological footprint is defined as
“…the land (and water) area that would be required to support a defined human population and material standard indefinitely.”
Population size and material standard are the two critical variables in the ecological footprint equation; these variables profoundly affect an ecosystem’s ability to support a human community in a sustainable manner. Defining an ecological footprint in physical terms has facilitated the development of ecological footprint calculators used to determine the total land area ‘consumed’ to support a given community living at a given material standard (more information on EF calculators is available at www.footprintnetwork.org).
Calculating footprint size is a powerfully persuasive exercise as it provides a quantitative reference of a human community’s impacts on an ecosystem. Consider that the ecological footprints of most Western World communities are so large that, if every human community on the planet lived in a similar manner, multiple planets would be required to supply the necessary resources to support them. In other words, our current approach is already unsustainable – lifestyle changes are critical for the future ecological sustainability of Ontario communities.
The EF also introduces basic principles of ecology into the realm of human community sustainability. This includes the consideration of carrying capacity – defined as the “maximum population size of a given species that an area can support without reducing its ability to support the same species in the future.” Closely associated with carrying capacity is the concept of overshoot – “growth beyond an area’s carrying capacity, leading to crash.” EFs reinforce the limits to growth and the importance of living within an environment’s ecological carrying capacity in order to avoid ecosystem crash. Ecological footprints also emphasize the fact that humans are an integral part of – not separate from – the ecosystems in which they live.
“Beyond a certain point, the material growth of the world economy can be purchased only at the expense of depleting natural capital and undermining the life-support services upon which we all depend.” – Wackernagel and Rees, 1995
Key considerations in planning for sustainability
Making sustainability the priority goal of planning efforts forces consideration of both where it is feasible for development and expansion to occur and how much additional growth a given community’s ecosystem is able to support. This approach also encourages consideration of the current size of a community’s ecological footprint and how material standards might need to be adjusted to accommodate current and additional community members in a truly sustainable manner.
Failure to consider basic questions of ‘Where to grow?’ and ‘How much to grow?’ is the fundamental problem with many provincial planning initiatives in Southern Ontario. Provincial planning efforts do not employ an ecosystem sustainability perspective to evaluate which communities have the carrying capacity available to accommodate population increases. The current approach ignores the fact that human communities are an integral part of the ecosystem that surrounds them, and that these ecosystems have carrying capacities – or limits to growth – that should determine the human population size that can be supported in a sustainable manner.
In some ways, it should be no surprise that the communities of Southern Ontario find themselves in an environmentally precarious situation. Human ingenuity has led to the creation of a host of technologies designed to artificially expand the apparent carrying capacity. Large-scale infrastructure and associated technologies have allowed communities, at least temporarily, to overcome the natural limits to growth that characterize any given ecosystem. But in stretching an ecosystem’s capacity beyond its natural limits, these communities are living on borrowed carrying capacity and are more vulnerable to ecosystem crash as a result. It is no coincidence that current planning and development functions – the problem priorities in the irreconcilable priorities dynamic described below – are inevitably directed toward further expanding the demands on the ecological systems of the GGH and other areas of Southern Ontario. It is the on-going, unchallenged pursuit of these problem priorities that will continue to undermine the goal of sustainable community development in Southern Ontario.
| This is an article from the 2006/07 Annual Report to the Legislature from the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. |
Citing This Article:
Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 2007. "Irreconcilable Priorities: The Challenge of Creating Sustainable Communities in Southern Ontario." Reconciling our Priorities, ECO Annual Report, 2006-07. Toronto, ON : Environmental Commissioner of Ontario. 14-20.
