Intelligent Communities think green

2008-10-14

What started out as punishment for an environmental offence has become an opportunity for leadership.

In the late 1990s, Alberta’s department of the environment took the City of Calgary to task over a large chlorine gas release from one of the city’s water treatment plants. As a result, the city was required to achieve certification to the International Organization for Standardization’s environmental management systems standard (ISO 14001) for the city's water treatment plants.

It was the beginning of a whole new way of thinking by the city’s council and staff.

"When the water treatment plants were directed to achieve certification to ISO 14001 to improve due diligence, it just made sense to do it on a broad scale to improve due diligence across the corporation", says Shannon Abbott, the team leader for the Calgary’s Environmental and Safety Management Business Unit Service.

In 2003, the City of Calgary became the first municipality in North America to become certified to ISO 14001.

"We've gained a much higher level of environmental awareness across the corporation," Abbott says. "Everyone, from the city manager to those who keep our roads clear in the winter, knows the environmental implications of their jobs. And everyone takes those implications very seriously."

Calgary is part of a wave of Canadian cities moving towards giving environmental development a place alongside economic and social development in order to become more intelligent and sustainable in its operations.

André Lambert, the deputy director responsible for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' (FCM) Green Municipal Fund, says there has been a definite movement towards implementing environmentally, socially and economically sustainable practices by municipal governments.

"There’s lots of great work at the municipal level," he says. "Canadian municipal governments are showing real leadership when it comes to sustainable development."

FCM is providing some direct support to the movement through its Green Municipal Fund (GMF). The Fund provides low-interest loans and grants and information resources to assist municipal governments in developing communities that are more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. Since the inception of FCM’s Fund in 2000, it has committed more than $375 million in grants and low-interest loans to support nearly 700 leading sustainable community development projects. These GMF-supported initiatives are leveraging almost $2.2 billion of economic activity in nearly 350 communities across Canada.

Lambert points to one of the FCM’s own programs as proof that the movement towards sustainable and intelligent communities is growing in Canada. The Federation hosts an annual study tour to various cities so that elected municipal officials and senior staff can see for themselves how those communities have implemented environmentally sustainable practices into their operations.

In 2008, the delegation visited sites in the city of Vancouver, Metro Vancouver, the resort municipality of Whistler, the city of Victoria and the Capital Regional District. The 2008 FCM Sustainable Communities Mission builds on last year’s Mission to Alberta, which was the first year since the FCM started offering these tours that all the stops included were Canadian municipalities.

Lambert says the Federation believes a sustainable community integrates environmental, social and economic objectives in its operations. Eventually, he says, this blend of elements produces long-term benefits far greater than the costs of the changes.

In Calgary, Abbott says, certifying the environmental management system of a municipality that is better known for its rodeos and connection to the petroleum industry, to ISO 14001, was a challenge.

"It certainly hasn’t been easy," she says. "We know why we’re the first municipality in North America to have done this; it was a lot of work and there are still things to improve on."

However, she says, the city is starting to see the benefits of its commitment to the environmental management system.

Abbott says the City has become more effective in its day-to-day work since becoming registered to the standard.

"We’re much more organized and more procedural in our documentation," she says. This has resulted in time savings, especially when it comes to training new staff in the high-turnover workplace.

"It used to be that when someone left the organization, so did a great deal of knowledge," adds Abbott. "By having things documented and the records managed properly it has helped reduce those problems when people leave for another job or retire. The information now stays with the organization."

The City of Fredericton has also reaped environmental benefits from its move to become an intelligent city. After about half-a-decade of transforming itself from a university and government town to a knowledge and information technology hub, the city became the first in Canada to achieve certification to the ISO standard for quality management systems (ISO 9001) in 2004.   

Don Fitzgerald is the executive director of the city’s business development organization, Team Fredericton. He says becoming certified to ISO 9001 was a logical part of the city’s focus on sustainable development.

"It’s striving for quality and excellence, and it’s evidence to our citizens and the world at large that this municipality is well-run, that it takes its challenges seriously," explains Fitzgerald.

One of the challenges the City is tackling is that of reducing its negative effect on the environment. The city has set a goal to reduce its corporate greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, and community greenhouse gas emissions by 6 per cent between 2000 and 2010. Fredericton is also focusing on becoming the first city in Canada to reach compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.

Fitzgerald says the certification goes hand-in-hand with this goal.

"It’s a pillar of our development strategy: say what you’re going to do, do what you said," he explains.

So far, the city has upgraded municipal buildings to improve their energy efficiency, reduced the size of its municipal fleet of vehicles and replaced some older vehicles with hybrid models, and changed incandescent street lights to LED units.

Projects such as these have led to the city winning a number of environmental awards, such as the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME) National Pollution Prevention Award for Greenhouse Gases Reduction in 2006, and the 2006 Environmental Leadership Award, as well as commendations from Environment Canada, and the now environmentalist, former US Vice-President Al Gore.

In May of 2008, Fredericton’s environmental efforts and its knowledge-friendly infrastructure of wireless computer networks helped gain the city recognition as one of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities in the world by the Intelligent Community Forum, a New York-based think tank.

Fredericton has several more projects in the works, including the set-up of marked bicycle lanes throughout the city, introducing an anti-idling policy for municipal vehicles in the winter and summer, and replacing ageing water and sewer pipes in an effort to conserve fresh water supplies.

Fitzgerald says these endeavours are all part of what Fredericton imagines for its future as a smart community.

"We are an economy driven by knowledge firms – in the ICT sector, in the engineering sector, in geomatics – that’s who we are," he says.

“We’re trying to set the conditions so the next breakout economy in Fredericton is the green economy.”

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This article first appeared in Volume 35 of CONSENSUS Magazine, 2008.  The information it contains was accurate at the time of publication but has not been updated or revised since, and may not reflect the latest updates on the topic.  If you have specific questions or concerns about the content, please contact the Standards Council of Canada.

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