It’s an interesting idea: someone whose job it is to actually test whether or not a project is resilient enough to meet the changing environmental issues that face municipalities, provinces and states right across North America. And whether the rules governing development in an area are actually up to the task.
Enter the resilience officer.
It’s a new position, a kind of devil’s advocate to look at current standards and practices, and point out where they might not be good enough anymore. And it’s getting more and more popular with towns trying to deal with the changing ground rules of things like climate change.
It addresses a crucial conflict of interest: developers want development, obviously, and so do municipalities. A growing tax base is a sign of a community’s success, and councils are often in the extremely difficult position of having to question projects that, electorally, they’d really, really like to have. A project can cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s, and yet still have fundamental flaws that can come back to haunt everyone from mayor to councillor to developer to homeowner.
The resilience officer asks “what if?”
In the courts, there’s a similar concept known as the amicus curiae; in cases where someone decides they want to represent themselves — a situation that prosecutors might secretly delight in — the court sometimes appoints a lawyer to assist a defendant through the court process anyway. The term literally translates as “a friend of the court,” offering experience or legal reasoning that might not otherwise be introduced by a non-legally trained defendant.
Now, developers already have to jump through scores of environmental and civil rules to get their projects to go ahead; I’m not saying that those who analyze projects against the set rules don’t do a valuable and comprehensive job.
The question for a resilience officer is not whether the current rules are being adequately applied. No, their job is to consider whether or not the rules themselves are adequate in a world that is seeing changing circumstances — very different rainfall and temperature patterns, for example, meaning floods and the potential for large-scale fires that wasn’t seen in past years.
Can the rest of a city handle the runoff from increased rainfall and the denuding of suburban hillsides to build car-friendly cul-de-sac-based developments? Are catchment basin and storm surge basin sizes really large enough?
Those aren’t the questions a city’s engineers are going to answer for each project, let alone consider the cumulative effects of a whole raft of developments.
Municipalities already enforce rules. Resilience officers test those rules to see if they will actually deliver the protections to life and property that they were introduced to deliver.
It’s bringing new information, and probably new standards, to the table. (You can see why resilience officers might not be the most popular civil servants at the developers’ dance. Imagine following all the existing rules to push forward a development that’s taken years of your life, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of your money, only to be told that the rules you’ve been following for all that time are no longer up to snuff.)
Whole areas of the Atlantic provinces have already seen what happens when you depend on yesterday’s infrastructure standards to meet today’s climate realities. Changes are coming among the most staid of industries; the insurance industry’s decision to move to overland flooding protection comes as more and more clients are facing damage from unexpected and new overland flooding incidents.
When circumstances are changing faster than standards and rules are, someone has to be around to help communities play catch-up.
It’s about time cities and towns hired an advocate to watch out for their long game.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in 39 SaltWire newspapers and websites in Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
