Urbanization and Forest Change
This indicator describes changes in land use that include loss of forest land, as well as increase in urbanization and accompanying impervious surface cover. Patterns of land use and land cover are one of the driving forces behind overall ecosystem health.

What can I do?

There are a number of community design approaches that function well for all of us, creating an aesthetically beautiful visual landscape that supports our children's future. The overarching policy approach in the region has been Smart Growth, which optimizes the functioning of natural lands, sensitive areas like wetlands, and working forests and farms, while concentrating development where it make sense economically and socially. You can think of it as intelligent long-range community planning and asset management.

Under this approach a number of other tools, including economic incentives, are used to keep farms in farming and forests in forestry.

Embrace Smart Growth

Smart Growth objectives use tools and incentives to create livable communities that are successful on all levels. Think about what you like regarding your living space. It is green and lush, safe for your kids, convenient, inspires socializing and active lifestyles. It doesn't take hours to commute to work. It has the distinct imprint of your community, not a carbon copy of just anyone's community.

Smart Growth is becoming increasingly popular and a major driver in the way North Americans conceptualize, design and build communities worth living in.

Smart Growth's Approach

Smart Growth uses the following approaches:

• Mix land use (combined residential and business like a European piazza)
• Take advantage of compact building design
  
• Options for housing types
  
• Walkable neighborhoods
  
• Distinctive, attractive communities with a strong sense of place
  
• Open space, farmland, forestland, natural beauty protection
  
• Strengthen and direct development towards existing communities
  
• Options for transportation (bike, rail, bus, kayak, ferry, carpool)
  
• Development decisions are predictable, fair and cost effective
  
• Above all, encourage and use community collaboration in development decisions⁹

Smart Growth at Home

In some cases, local design standards and ordinances discourage or even prohibit the use of Smart Growth tools. For instance, many traditional ordinances require wide streets, excessive parking, and other setback requirements.¹⁰

Natural Approaches to Stormwater Management (or "Low Impact Development")

Natural approaches to stormwater management, or low impact development (LID), is one tool from the Smart Growth toolbox. LID is a combination of approaches that:

• Reduce harm to freshwater and marine environments, including fish and shellfish habitat
  
• Reduce the cost of stormwater collections systems
  
• Are aesthetically beautiful and biologically diverse

LID takes advantage of the extraordinary capacity of living soils and vegetation to capture polluted rainwater, slow its movement and prevent it from rushing, untreated, into freshwater streams by mimicking the processes of nature. The tool box also includes a variety of manmade materials that are porous and breathe, called permeable surfaces.

LID techniques include:

• Rain gardens (sometimes called bioswales or bioretention areas). These are built areas, with soils amended with compost and other healthy biological matter, use of plants and trees to soak up, or infiltrate or evaporate polluted runoff
  
• Soil amendments, which might include up to 12 inches or more of forest duff – the soft beautiful top layer from forests, compost, topsoil mixed with organic matter
  
• Permeable materials, which includes paving stones, structural glass, Ecostone, Gravel Pave, pervious concrete, and grass parking lots
  
• Green roofs, which are engineered to contain plant matter (habitat, reduces cooling load, provides oxygen, retains water and has a longer life than a conventional roof which degrades from heat and cracking)
  
• Open road sections with vegetated areas (swales)

LID has its historical roots in Europe and was first showcased in Davis, California in the early 1970s. Both Washington and British Columbia have a number of laws, ordinances and models to facilitate the use of natural stormwater approaches. See References for links.

Examples of LID in action include the BC Growth Strategies Act (Part 25 of BC Local Government Act), BC SmartGrowth, WA's Growth Management Act and larger municipalities' strategic plans. See the Greater Vancouver Regional District's Livable Regions Strategic Plan¹² and King County's Smart Growth Initiative.¹³

The Limitations of Traditional Stormwater Controls

Traditionally, engineering tools such as detention ponds have been used to reduce the amount of polluted runoff reaching streams. Research in King County, as well as in North America, indicate these approaches are not enough to protect water quality. Flooding, erosion, routing sediments to streams and the widening and "wilding" of the structure and form of stream channels (channel morphology) continue to occur.¹⁴

Supporting Farms through Local Food Purchases

In addition to legal mechanisms, the beauty, local sense of place and sheer joy associated with food provides market forces to keep farms in farming. Farm Folk-City Folk supports the Incredible Edible farm tours, BC Farmland Watch Network, Feast of Fields fundraisers and a resource database that encourages local, seasonal and sustainable food production.¹⁹

Similar to BC, the profusion of Puget Sound farm marketing options such as farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture (direct purchase from farmers during the growing season) and chef-farmer groups such as the Chefs Collaborative Seattle help keep farms in farming. For example, in 2003, sales at a mere five farmers market in Seattle created over $3 million in revenue.

Keep Forests Working through Market Tools and Stricter Laws

The Puget Lowland Forests lie between the Olympic Peninsula and western slopes of the Cascade Mountains. In British Columbia, this ecoregion includes the Fraser Valley lowlands, the coastal lowlands locally known as the "Sunshine Coast" and several of the Gulf Islands.²⁰

Only five percent of our original forest habitat remains and between 90-100 percent has been altered in some way within our short European settlement history. Remaining riparian forests in the region protect important spawning areas for salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.), and provide habitat for amphibians and snails, roost sites for bats, perching and nesting sites for bald eagles, and travel corridors for wildlife (e.g., Black-tailed deer, neotropical migratory birds). Protecting these remaining riparian and low elevation forests from clearing and development will be essential for mantaining the quality and productivity of local streams, wetlands and shorelines into the future. Maintaining both working forests and conservation buffers help reduce urban sprawl and protect local watersheds.

: Go back to the Ecosystem Indicators home page :