Your community relies on natural assets every day: rivers and aquifers supply drinking water, wetlands and forests that manage runoff, trees lower urban temperature, beaches reduce erosion, and natural spaces support recreation and tourism. How often do we manage these like our built assets, as investments in our communities that have value and benefit from intentional service decisions?

But these assets don’t stop at municipal boundaries, and they directly affect your budgets, service delivery, and ability to secure funding under programs guided by the National Adaptation Strategy.

This hands-on workshop will show you how to link natural assets with conventional services, define service levels at a watershed scale, and be prepared to advocate for your community in discussions with provincial agencies, landowners, and funding bodies.

Using your own community as a case study, you will:

• Map connections between natural and built assets for integrated management.
• Apply a practical, intuitive tool (co-designed by CCNB and AIM Network) to assess ecosystem services to your community.
• Identify the natural asset(s) most critical to your service delivery and define the risks to those assets under climate change, growth, and decisions by other jurisdictions. 
• Build strategies to present findings to council and secure buy-in for protective action.
• Understand how to use this information in discussions with other agencies (provincial land owners, transportation departments and funding agencies)

You’ll leave with concrete skills to reduce risks, lower costs, and strengthen your community’s case for funding.