Natural Asset Management
Integrating natural systems into infrastructure planning.
The Greenbelt Foundation’s Natural Asset Management program helps municipalities across the Greenbelt recognize, inventory, and manage ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, aquifers, and streams as vital infrastructure that provide essential services like flood protection, water purification, and climate regulation.
Municipalities in Ontario are required to include natural assets (and their ecosystem services) in their asset management plans. This program offers training, tools, and monitoring support to help integrate the “natural infrastructure” provided by these ecosystems into municipal asset and infrastructure management plans. This includes assessing current practices, identifying barriers, and advancing pilot projects that inform more effective planning approaches.
Through collaboration with municipal staff, conservation authorities, and technical experts, the program builds local capacity for more sustainable and cost-effective infrastructure planning. By making natural assets visible in municipal and financial systems, the program enhances climate resilience and helps protect the long-term health of Greenbelt communities.
Goal
The Greenbelt’s near urban nature – over two million acres of wetlands, forests, aquifers, urban river valleys, agricultural soils, and other critical ecosystems – surround and intersect with towns and cities in Ontario’s most populated region and are one of our greatest resources to create resilient communities and meet today’s challenges.
The Greenbelt Foundation is helping to lead adoption of natural asset management (NAM) – the practice of identifying, valuing, and managing natural assets to provide critical services – by municipalities across the Greater Golden Horseshoe. In the process, we are supporting the ongoing protection, enhancement and restoration of the Greenbelt’s irreplaceable natural systems for the benefit of communities and all living things.
Natural Assets
Natural assets are preserved, restored, or enhanced natural resources and ecosystems that provide ongoing benefits to people.
They include:
- Forests
- Wetlands
- Meadows
- Prairies (Grasslands)
- Riparian areas
- Streams, rivers, and creeks
- Lakes
- Beaches
- Bluffs
- Parks
- Street trees
- Park trees
- Soils
- Aquifers
- Coastal shorelines
Forests
provide recreation and carbon storage
Rivers
provide waterflow (stormwater management)
Wetlands
provide water filtration and erosion control
Main Areas of Focus & Partnerships
The Greenbelt Foundation and leading partners like Natural Assets Initiative, Ontario conservation authorities, Asset Management Ontario, Association of Municipalities of Ontario, Municipal Finance Officers Association, Green Analytics, Intact Centre for Climate Adaptation, Watson & Associates, the efforts of Greenbelt municipalities, and many more have been supporting the development and implementation of our NAM program since 2020.
These efforts include:
- Developing, testing and advancing professional norms and standards to support the adoption of NAM practices by municipalities that reflect existing asset management processes being implemented to account for, manage and budget for gray infrastructure. Major resources include guidebooks created in partnership with local governments such as Nature is Infrastructure: How to Include Natural Assets in Asset Management Plans.
- Building municipal capacity by providing training, case studies and funding to integrate natural assets into their asset management plans and complete natural asset inventories and dashboards, condition and risk assessments, level of service valuations, and operations and maintenance budgets. Resources include a training webinar, inventory examples, case studies and blogs showcasing the social and financial benefits of local natural assets for small and large municipalities.
- Promoting leadership by municipal councils by identifying policy recommendations and council actions that will advance the adoption of NAM in their communities, including integrating natural assets into traditional asset management planning and embedding natural assets (and ecosystem services) into other municipal policies, plans and bylaws.
- Advancing innovation through watershed level protection bringing together neighbouring municipalities along a shared watershed to improve stormwater management through watershed-scale NAM planning.
- Embedding nature-based solutions into municipal climate and health actions by conducting novel research into the effectiveness of cooling corridors and other heat mitigation activities, and the creation of tools to support municipal actions.
- Engaging higher levels of government to support NAM by establishing natural infrastructure funds including a $200 million fund for small projects stream by the federal government.
- Creating a collaborative hub with municipalities and other partners to advance greater opportunities and overcome barriers to NAM.
Our Success & Funding Partners
The Greenbelt Foundation is monitoring advancements by Greenbelt municipalities to integrate natural assets into their asset management plans and identifying opportunities and challenges. By 2024, a majority of Greenbelt Municipalities have initiated activities towards integrating natural assets into infrastructure planning, policies and budgets:
- 67% of Greenbelt municipalities are in the process of integrating Natural Asset Management
- 41% have completed full or partial Natural Asset Inventories, service level evaluation and/or condition assessments of natural assets
- 22% have, in addition to inventories and service level identification, also initiated or completed a lifecycle management plan, financial strategy and/or Asset Management Plan
- 4% have completed the above and/or have initiated a natural infrastructure project and/or developed a continuous improvement strategy
The Foundation is grateful for the tremendous support of many funders who recognize the potential of NAM to benefits communities, climate adaptation and biodiversity. We extend our sincere thank you to:
- Echo Foundation
- McLean Foundation
- Chisholm Thomson Family Foundation
- Hamilton Community Foundation
- Hodgson Family Foundation
- Dalglish Family Foundation
- Province of Ontario
