CHOOSING OUR FUTURE PROJECT TIMELINES DOCUMENT 1
CHOOSING OUR FUTURE ORGANIZATIONAL CHART DOCUMENT 2
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8. UPDATE - CHOOSING OUR
FUTURE: AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE AND RESILIENT
NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION Choisir notre
avenir : une approche intégrée pour assurer la durabilité et la résilience de
la région de la capitale nationale |
Committee recommendation
That Council receive this report for
information.
Recommandation DU Comité
Que le Conseil prendre connaissance de ce rapport.
Documentation
1.
Deputy
City Manager’s report, Infrastructure Services and Community Sustainability
dated 20 April 2009 (ACS2009-ICS-CCS-0025).
Planning
and Environment Committee
Comité de l'urbanisme et de l'environnement
20 April 2009 / le 20 avril 2009
Submitted
by/Soumis par : Nancy Schepers, Deputy City Manager
Directrice municipale adjointe,
Infrastructure Services and Community
Sustainability
Services d’infrastructure et
Viabilité des collectivités
Contact Person/Personne ressource : Contact Person/Personne-ressource : Michael Murr, Acting
Director/Directeur intérimaire, Community and Sustainability Services/Services
de viabilité et des collectivités
(613)
580-2424 x25195, Michael.Murr@ottawa.ca
That
the Planning and Environment Committee recommend Council receive this report
for information.
Que le Comité de l'urbanisme et de l'environnement
recommande au Conseil de prendre connaissance du présent rapport.
Choosing our Future is an innovative joint planning initiative of the City of Ottawa, the City of Gatineau, and the National Capital Commission. The goal of the initiative is to help the National Capital Region face the challenges of the 21st century by integrating the concepts of sustainability and resiliency into all facets of regional planning and design. The premise of the initiative is that a sustainable community is not only efficient, but also resilient – a community designed to be shock-resistant, adaptable, and prepared for a variety of possible futures. Choosing our Future is about ensuring that sustainability and resiliency are crosscutting themes that can be integrated effectively into land use planning, building design, infrastructure, and social and economic systems.
Choosing our Future is characterized by a number of innovations:
· Regional scale planning – Choosing our Future emphasizes how the city’s functions are interlinked to the surrounding ecosystems of the National Capital Region. This perspective can be used to set targets for local self-reliance and for reducing net carbon emissions and ecological footprints.
· A “systems approach” - Envisions the National Capital Region as a whole.
· Extended time horizons - Choosing our Future will extend planning time horizons to 30‑100 years to identify and respond to long-term trends, and to fully understand the long-term consequences of today’s decisions.
· Urban security by design – Risk mitigation and prevention will be addressed from a long-term planning perspective instead of focusing primarily on natural disasters and responsibilities of first responders.
· Collaborative planning and design - Choosing our Future uses a collaborative model that should assist the region in shifting towards integrated solutions at the most appropriate scale rather than adopting boundaries constrained by political or service territories.
Choosing our Future was initiated in 2004 with a major conference on community sustainability. Over the next two years, a number of initiatives were undertaken to build on the initial momentum and to set the stage for further fundraising and partnership building. This phase culminated in the agreement by the Tripartite National Planning Committee that the National Capital Region must function together as a sustainable economic and environmental unit.
Since Choosing our Future began, public concern over environmental issues has grown substantially. The public is increasingly aware of the need to plan for long-term community sustainability. Coupled with the current global economic downturn, more people have expressed a desire to be involved in long-term planning for sustainable communities.
The Federal and Provincial Governments are also increasingly aware of their role in sustainable development. New funding mechanisms emphasize investments that are sustainable over the long-term. For instance, support for new municipal infrastructure funding is continuing to grow, with monies channelled through Federal Green Funds, and the Province of Ontario’s Gas Tax Agreement with municipalities.
On 10 May 2006, Council directed staff to seek funding and received the work plan for the initiative (Ref # ACS2006-PGM-POL-0030 and Ref #: ACS2006-PWS-DCM-0002).
This report provides a progress report for the Choosing our Future initiative, as it now gets fully underway. The focus of this phase is to put the partnership and ideas into action with an expectation that the project will be completed by early 2011.
Choosing our Future is an initiative that will “future-proof” the City of Ottawa, the City of Gatineau and the National Capital Region by helping to make this region resilient and sustainable in the long term.
Choosing our Future will ultimately produce three plans that are integrated and long-term. Collectively, the final reports will create a vision for long-term sustainability, identify strategies and policies that will guide a new generation of strategic plans, and produce a sustainability/resiliency lens that can assist everyday decision-making. These recommendations will address the short, medium and long-term horizons of the National Capital Region.
1. A Sustainability Plan
The Sustainability Plan, with its long-term vision and 30-year targets and strategies, will function as a strategic policy document at the highest tier, providing an overarching context and direction for government policy throughout the region. Within the City of Ottawa, for example, the Sustainability Plan will provide long-range guidance to the Official Plan, Infrastructure and Transportation Master Plans, Environmental Strategy, Economic Strategy, Emergency Management Plan, and Long-range Financial Plan.
The Sustainability Plan will translate long-term pathways into short term actions by showcasing catalyst projects – projects within the region that are helping to put us on the right path. In addition, Choosing our Future will include the development of a sustainability and resiliency lens that can be used to evaluate important initiatives and investment decisions on an ongoing basis from the perspective of sustainability and resiliency.
2. A Risk Mitigation and Prevention Plan
The Risk Mitigation and Prevention Plan will build on the Sustainability Plan and will include a number of research projects, culminating in a comprehensive set of recommendations for how to increase the resiliency of the region through long-term planning and particularly through alternative approaches to land use and infrastructure design. The plan will work towards a community capable of reducing risks and recovering from potential social, epidemiological and natural hazards.
The work will begin with an update to Ottawa’s first Vulnerability Analysis conducted in 2003, to include a more rigorous analysis that addresses long-term sustainability issues such as resource scarcities, climate change, and demographic change. The Risk Mitigation and Prevention Plan will include mitigation/prevention plans for each area identified by the updated Vulnerability Analysis. As well, the plans will include long-term and short-term mitigation/preventive activities and the identification of responsibility.
The Plan will respond to Ontario’s Emergency Management Act, which now requires that each municipality develop an emergency management program that includes four core components: mitigation-prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. The need to include prevention and mitigation dovetails with a sustainability plan that emphasizes resiliency.
3. A Community Energy Plan
The Community Energy Plan (CEP) will build on and benefit from the Sustainability Plan and the Risk Mitigation and Prevention Plan. The CEP will establish an appropriate mix of strategies based upon a set of broad performance targets for security, resource availability, emissions, costs, and the carrying capacity of built infrastructure and ecological systems. Strategies will integrate alternative energy system design – the supply side, with energy efficient buildings, transportation, land use planning and other demand side factors.
The Community Energy Plan is an integral part of the broader initiative and will be sharing the same framework, methodology, and tools. This plan will provide a blueprint to an energy future that complements and supports the broader sustainability and resiliency objectives of Choosing our Future. The implementation of this plan will address several aspects of Choosing our Future such as: climate change mitigation/adaptation, emergency preparedness, local economic development, urban security, and food self-sufficiency.
The coordinated systems perspective that is being applied to all three major Choosing our Future deliverables will ensure that important decisions are supporting long-term community sustainability. This perspective will help to avoid reactive and isolated/sporadic measures for example – a project for wind-generated electricity, a green development, a transit line – and instead involve all players in a collective effort to build a sustainable community. Choosing our Future will help shift thinking from a reactive, problem–solving approach, to a proactive asset-based approach based on end state goals informed by fundamental principles of sustainability.
The initiative will cover a range of municipal policy, program and service areas from economic, environmental, social and cultural perspectives. These include transportation; land use and design; infrastructure; recreation, parks and open space; habitat; natural capital; health and human security; culture and education; economy; waste control; food and agriculture; communications, governance, and decision support; and social equity.
In addition to project funding from the City of Ottawa, City of Gatineau, and the National Capital Commission, the initiative has successfully attracted other sources of funding that have created a total budget envelope of $1,060,000. The table below illustrates the sources of funding for this initiative.
|
Source |
Funding |
|
City of Ottawa, Infrastructure Services and Community Sustainability |
$150,000 |
|
City of Ottawa, Emergency Management Program |
$200,000 |
|
City of Ottawa, Emergency Management Program (for Vulnerability Analysis) |
$50,000 |
|
Federal Green Municipal Fund (administered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities |
$350,000 |
|
City of Gatineau |
$100,000 |
|
National Capital Commission (NCC) |
$100,000 |
|
J. W. McConnell Foundation/The Natural Step |
$75,000 |
|
Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) |
$35,000 |
|
TOTAL |
$1,060,000 |
This section describes the components of the Choosing our Future project which is broken down as follows:
· Project Organization and Scoping
· Engagement and Communications
· Creating a Shared Understanding of Success
· Analysis and Roadmap to Transition
· Action Plan (Final reports)
Document 1 illustrates these phases, timelines, and key decision points when the project team will report to Committee and Council.
The project management, organization and administration are already in place. The organizational chart is attached (Document 2).
· The project is guided by the Tripartite Committee comprised of the City of Ottawa, Gatineau, and NCC. A Core Team, led by the City of Ottawa, with representation from all partner agencies, makes major strategic and administrative decisions.
· Partnership Agreements have been drafted and signed by the National Capital Commission and the City of Gatineau; both organizations are contributing $100,000 each to this project.
· A Project Secretariat comprised of the project manager, communications and administrative staff was set up to support the initiative as a whole.
· Several Resource Groups including internal and external expertise in support of the project team have been established. Additional resource groups will be set up as needed throughout the life of the project.
· A draft Work Plan and schedule have been prepared and have guided the project to date.
· A Request for Proposal (RFP) for the principal consulting study was completed and posted on MERX (the electronic tendering service for government contracts) in February 2009. A large interdisciplinary team is expected to be on board by mid May 2009. This team will lead all subsequent work.
· The selection of sustainability principles, end state goals, core areas and strategic areas for analysis and action have also started and will be further shaped by the community and the project team in 2009.
· The Foresight Workshop and Design Charrette was held at Arts Court, in December 2008. Approximately 80 professionals (including designers, engineers and planners) attended this three-day event. The Charrette explored the implications of a range of external forces such as climate change, globalization, technology transformation, and demographic shifts on urban and rural systems within the National Capital Region. Participants worked as a team to assess system vulnerabilities in the face of these forces and to explore the potential for interventions that might improve the resiliency and sustainability of the Region over the long-term. Mechanisms were evaluated by the team for translating the results of the Foresight Workshop and the End-State Goals to the Region’s settlement patterns, mobility networks, infrastructure systems, green spaces, and neighbourhoods. The team worked towards long-term, integrated design strategies that provide a solution to many of the challenges posed by transformative forces. A video and Final Report with recommendations from the Charrette are due shortly.
Key milestones for 2009 include the public announcement of the initiative, the initiation of the principal consulting study, capacity building, more intensive public engagement activities, the organization of a public symposium in the fall, and reporting back to Committee and Council on shared sustainability principles, shared end-state goals or vision for a series of strategic areas that shape a sustainable community. These activities are described in more detail in the following paragraphs:
Project Launch– May 8, 2009 (date to be confirmed)
The objectives of the project launch are to move the initiative to the pubic domain and to launch the project’s web site and announce the funding received from different sources. The three partner organizations, the City of Ottawa, the City of Gatineau, and the National Capital Commission, representatives of the Federal Government and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, as well many members of the community will be in attendance.
The Choosing our
Future website (www.choosingourfuture.ca) will go live in conjunction with the
public launch. The first Choosing Our Future newsletter is also due to be
released that day.
Engagement and Communications
Public engagement and consultation commenced in mid-2008 with the organization of the Choosing our Future Resource Groups and the Foresight Workshop and Design Charrette. While not all events and activities have been identified for the full duration of this project, the major event planned for 2009 will be the Choosing Our Future Symposium in the fall. The project website and newsletter launched in April 2009 will play a major role in keeping in touch and current on both project activities and related activities in the community.
Community Partnership Program
Parallel with the Choosing our Future initiative, the City of Ottawa will initiate the “Community Partnership Program” beginning in 2009. The City will call on and support organizations to join the effort by providing opportunities to become engaged in the various project activities, increase their knowledge of sustainability and make a commitment to action. The intent is that these organizations and their work will provide an example for other residents and organizations to follow.
Role of Members of Council
Council members provide a vital link to residents and the community at large. The communications and public engagement role of Councillors is very important and Councillors will be asked to “champion” the Choosing our Future initiative
The Choosing our Future project needs a shared understanding of sustainability. This shared understanding and common language will need to be developed and transmitted to all participants including Councillors, staff, consultants, partners, and members of the community. The Capacity Building component of the initiative will be delivered with the help of advisors from The Natural Step Canada (TNS), who will work with City staff and other partners to develop a capacity training program that includes sustainability principles, a systematic framework for research and analysis, and specific tools such as backcasting. This training will be fully relevant to municipal services and operations, project requirements, and the community partners involved in the Choosing our Future initiative.
The principal consulting study described bellow will have a series of clear deliverables in 2009. While the consultants, staff and the community will start work on most components of the study, 2009 activities and deliverables will focus on shared sustainability principles, and shared end-state goals for the four dimensions of sustainability (environmental, economic, social and cultural). These components have strong linkages to the new Community Sustainability Department and will help to create a shared understanding of success, a long-term vision, a draft sustainability lens, and a strategic direction for community sustainability.
Choosing Our Future Fall Symposium
A Choosing Our Future Symposium has been scheduled for the end of September. In addition to presentations and workshops related to the initiative, community organizations will be offered a platform to present their own views. Students from the Carleton University School of Public Policy and Administration in partnership with the City of Ottawa are organizing a youth component to this conference to be held around the same time.
The objectives for the Symposium include:
· Review 21st century challenges
· Provide a collective learning environment
· Seek consensus on a common language of sustainability
· Set guiding principles for this project (based on a presented draft)
· Validate, build on, and confirm end-state community goals (vision)
· Provide guidance for Choosing our Future and also guidance for other community initiatives or personal initiatives
· Inform people about the Choosing our Future initiative
This component
will start during the summer of 2009 and will take one and a half years to
complete. It includes:
· Seeds of Sustainability: Inventory of Community Assets and Baseline Information
· Vulnerability Analysis Update
· Sustainability and Resiliency Analysis of Plans, Services, and Programs
· Targets and Indicators
· Implementation and Road Map to Transition
· Catalyst projects
· White Papers
The project components listed above are strongly interrelated and build on each other. The final reports: Sustainability Plan, Risk Mitigation and Prevention Plan, and Community Energy Plan will be completed in the spring of 2011.
Consultation and engagement activities are described in the Stakeholder Engagement section above. Consultation activities are integrated in every phase of this initiative.
There are no legal/risk management implications in receiving the information set out in this report.
There are no financial implications associated with this report. The budget for this initiative is identified in the table contained above in the Funding section of the Discussion. Funding will be available in the Capital Budget, Project 900006, Choosing our Future and the Emergency Management Plan.
Document 1 - Choosing our Future Project Timelines
Document 2 - Choosing our Future Organizational Chart
This report is provided for the information of Committee and Council.
CHOOSING OUR FUTURE PROJECT TIMELINES DOCUMENT 1
CHOOSING OUR FUTURE ORGANIZATIONAL CHART DOCUMENT 2