Thank you.
For a bit of context, we manage about 9,000 hectares of parks within the city itself. Fully 50% of that is considered to be natural environment parks.
Some of the signature parks within our system are places like Nose Hill, which is the largest urban natural area in a municipality in the country. The Inglewood Bird Sanctuary, which was originally founded as a federal bird sanctuary, is the cornerstone of our environmental education program and is still an important migratory sanctuary in the downtown core as well.
In terms of natural area management within the context of a large urban centre, our understanding of what's needed has certainly changed. Quite clearly, what we do as a parks department has changed significantly as well. Conservation in the context of urban development is certainly a challenge and is certainly different from larger park management itself. We deal with issues like permanent impacts and loss that come with development.
We deal with the fact that in a lot of cases the support systems for critical ecological areas are all quite often impaired or significantly changed. Invasive species are a dominant issue for us in terms of management. Ultimately we deal with an inevitable transition with respect to biodiversity. We see a homogenization of ecosystems and species in many respects.
Our parks department is about 100 years old. We've managed natural areas explicitly for the past 30 or so years, so through the experience we've had, we've learned a number of things that are quite important to bring to bear.
One is the issue of design. We as a municipality are constantly challenged with how to design and maintain functional, viable, and sustainable natural environments in a city core. We recognize that natural environments are integral to the city. They are not something you put behind a fence. They are something you have to weave within the fabric of the city itself.
There is the issue of management. They are often seen as low-cost or even no-cost options for a park system, when we would say the opposite is true. They have costs and need to be managed as such.
We are struggling with a number of issues that are beyond our control. Climate change is one of them. Within the context of southern Alberta, we're in a water scarce region. We need to plan for and learn to adapt to the inevitable changes that will come in the future.
We are looking at the issue of ecological goods and services. We see that as an excellent way to address the value of these systems within the city itself. We think we have a good handle on water and wetlands, but we're starting to say we need to think about the park system itself. The urban forest and all of that is part of the city's critical infrastructure.
The city itself has a fairly strong history of advocacy and protection for natural areas. Some of it stretches back nearly a century. Some of the things we have done which we think are examples of best practices are things like our wetland conservation plan, which is one of the first wetland policies for a municipality in Canada. It is perhaps one of our more interesting success stories in that it introduced a mechanism that allows for compensation and mitigation for loss of wetlands. We found that to be a tremendously valuable tool to do a couple of things: to raise the value and the importance of wetlands within the context of decision-making in the city, but also to give us the tools to plan and mitigate and ultimately conserve wetlands in a more sustainable landscape.
We've done some of these things through the lens of things like imagine Calgary. In 2005, the city embarked on a conversation with 18,000 Calgarians. We asked Calgarians what they thought the city should be like in 100 years. The answers we got were fairly interesting. They spoke a lot of connections. They talked a lot about conservation. We heard quite clearly that Calgarians value their natural environment. This is not just within the city itself, but also beyond. Regionally these are important landscapes to us.
That document has shaped some of the policy and some of the direction the City of Calgary is now embarking on. Our municipal development plan, which is our statutory plan that guides us through the next 60 years, has worked in some of those concepts and policies of conservation, biodiversity, green infrastructure, and protection within the context of a growing and denser city.
Last year our city council elected to sign the Durban commitment for biodiversity, which makes us the third Canadian city to sign on to a commitment to make biodiversity a central plank of what we do. Behind Edmonton and Montreal, we now join about 50 cities worldwide that are saying biodiversity and conservation should be an important part of what we do in providing municipal service.
We're doing things like environmental education, with the recognition that we need to promote environmental literacy among Calgarians. We need not only to give them the knowledge to understand what's important and why these things are valuable to us, but also to give them the incentive to act and to have stewardship over what we own.
We look at it from the cultural perspective, as well. We have cultural landscapes that we've been restoring in the City of Calgary, and that, to us, is yet another way to tie us to the landscape. Ultimately, that's what we think we try to do in the parks department.
Some of the other things we're doing, which are perhaps of interest to the committee, are things like invasive species management. This is a big issue for us. Calgary has developed an early detection rapid response model that has taken off regionally. In fact, it now involves all three levels of government. We coordinate a monitoring program within the Bow River Valley, which now involves local municipalities, the Province of Alberta, and Banff National Park. We think it is a good model which shows collaboration and cooperation within the region.
One of the questions you asked in your terms of reference is what the federal rural and urban conservation would be. I'll close with three things that we thought we would bring to your attention.
We need more conversations with local authorities. As a municipality that delivers on the front lines on a number of outcomes related to the environment, we would welcome any opportunity to build bridges and collaborate. We need your expertise, and we can help deliver some of those outcomes. There's recognition that implementation of some of these programs in conservation is inherently local. National and international leadership in conservation would require effective local implementation. Finally, we need a recognition that urban conservation itself is a critical part of the urban infrastructure. We would look for examples and opportunities to include ecosystem management as part of the infrastructure granting programs.
We'd be happy to answer any questions when the time comes.