April 17, 2023 at 9:49 am
The Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority has made some updates to one of its strategies.
The agency’s program coordinator announced plans to update the watershed management strategy to the board at a meeting last week.
“It looks at our watersheds, our problems and our challenges, and then comes up with action plans and recommendations to address them,” said program coordinator Kate Monk. “The big difference with this watershed strategy is that it also includes financial information, so it helps us in our budgetary projections.”
Monk said the last watershed management strategy was completed about eight years ago and a lot has changed in that time. Monk said the financial aspect is new, and that the strategy also embraces climate change.
“We know more now than we did before, and we realize we need to manage watersheds to adapt to climate change and help us adapt to climate change,” she said.
Climate change is not going away, at least in the short term, Monk said, so we have to adapt, and we’ve built watersheds that are as resilient as possible. The actions they have to take to achieve their goals do cost money, so the financial information in the strategy will help them create a budget and source as much as possible to get the money they need, she added.
According to Monk, they develop their strategy in-house rather than using consultants, and they already have a lot of background information from other reports. This strategy is a requirement of the DA Act, but they will be able to use the vast amount of information they already have and simply update it to bring it up to date, Monk said.