91ÒùĸÊÓƵ

Overview

Impacts of climate change in prairie cities include droughts, heatwaves, and air pollution resulting from wildfires in surrounding areas. Adequate and effective adaptation measures are necessary at the individual and city levels. Motivated by the gardening culture, the research project examines the opportunities and challenges of substituting conventional lawn-based gardening practices with the use of native pollinator plants (NPGs). The advantages of NPGs over lawns are numerous and remarkable, including significant water savings, the elimination of environmentally damaging fertilizers and herbicides, preservation of urban biodiversity, enhancement of physical and emotional health, and increased carbon sequestration.

Based on the resulting policy framework, existing policies in North America, the charrette exercise and homeowners’ and users’ preferences, policy recommendations include financial, information and educational interventions. The research outcomes benefit homeowners, organizations promoting NPGs, businesses seeking to become more environmentally friendly, and policymakers in adopting effective policy interventions. From an academic perspective, the research addresses gardening practices as a climate adaptation measure that has been scarcely studied. Future work will accurately estimate the environmental benefits of NPGs, including carbon sequestration, and determine the cost-effectiveness of alternative policies. Additionally, it will design funding mechanisms from the city’s perspective.

91ÒùĸÊÓƵ objectives

• Identify and quantify the ecosystem services that suburban residential areas can provide and their contributions to wellbeing (i.e., mapping of ecosystem services potentially produced).
• Determine the challenges homeowners face to become ecosystem services providers, including monetary and nonmonetary factors.
• Identify willingness to pay for the benefits associated with ecosystem services of native/pollinator gardens.
• Assess the policy elements that will make a market for suburban ecosystem services feasible in Canadian Prairies cities.