Good afternoon. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. I'd like to acknowledge that I come to you from the unceded territory of the Lekwungen-speaking people, who are the Songhees, the Saanich and Esquimalt nations.
Through the Healthy Watersheds Initiative, which funded 27 million dollars' worth of work, and the indigenous watersheds initiative, which has funded 15 million dollars' worth of projects, we have seen investments in what I'll refer to as sort of low-tech restoration work. The activities were not massive infrastructure, for which we see multi-million dollar investments, but involved community organizations and local governments working together to restore riparian areas and wetlands.
Coree mentioned McKay Creek in North Vancouver. These kinds of techniques are literally about planting willow stakes. We have a project in the Chilako region of northern B.C. near Nechako in the territory of the Carrier Sekani. Under a million dollars of restoration work has happened there to deal with flooding impacts and also to help restore salmon habitat, for which the costs per square metre were significantly less than those for any kind of hard infrastructure work that would happen in that region. It's an example of literally putting stakes in the ground and having the data to be able to do that work.
We also saw work in the Peach Creek and Hooge Wetland, where there was the same kind of issue of a wetland being restored at a significantly lower cost than would be the case for any hard infrastructure. There need to be ongoing investments in that in terms of maintenance, but the results were significant in terms of flood attenuation during the epic floods of 2021.