Peeling back the Pavement - POLIS Water Sustainability Project

About the handbook: MOVING FORWARD BY PEELING BACK
Peeling Back the Pavement: A Blueprint for Reinventing Rainwater Management in
Canada’s Communities is a resource for decision makers, community leaders, and
local government staff who want to take action to improve stormwater management.
This handbook is not a technical how-to guidebook or manual for developing
stormwater or watershed management plans. Instead, it makes the case—from
ecological and financial perspectives—for a new approach to managing rainfall and
snowmelt in Canada’s communities, and seeks to engage in a sophisticated discussion
about rainwater governance.
The purpose of this handbook is to empower communities to “peel back the
pavement” and manage rainwater in concert with natural systems. It outlines the
problems associated with the Stormwater City, and then provides a blueprint for
transitioning to the Rainwater City.
The core focus of this handbook is on reducing the amount of impermeable
surfaces in urban areas, repairing and upgrading broken drainage infrastructure,
using rain as a resource, and integrating local land and water management on a
watershed scale. With these actions, communities can adopt a rainwater approach
to managing wet weather.
Getting there will require
“How can we move beyond
a transformation in practice, current best practices, use rain
priorities, and how and by whom as a resource, and prevent the
key decisions are made. The approach
outlined in this hand-
problem of runoff altogether?”
book is not only better for ecosystems, it is also less expensive than conventional
management techniques (even in the short term and most certainly in the long
term) and therefore sustainable.
Over the past several decades, numerous reports have documented and catalogued
the damage caused by urban stormwater runoff and offered detailed
prescriptions to improve its management (see Appendix). Many communities
across Canada have attempted to improve upon conventional stormwater
management by introducing additional measures that improve the quality and
reduce the volume of runoff. While some jurisdictions are ahead of others, a
complete integration of land- and water-use decisions has yet to be realized.
The questions of why poor stormwater decisions continue to be made in many
places and why positive alternative management practices are rarely fully
employed or widely implemented (despite being increasingly recognized as a
viable solution) have not, to date, been effectively addressed. This handbook
goes beyond the question of “What are the problems with stormwater runoff?”
by asking “How can we move beyond current best practices, use rain as a
resource, and prevent the problem of runoff altogether?”
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