April 17, 2023 9:49am
The Ausable Bayfield Conservation Authority has made some updates to one of its strategies.
The authority’s Project Coordinator announced a plan for an updated Watershed Management Strategy to the board at last week’s meeting.
“It looks at our watersheds and the issues and the challenges and then comes up with action plans and recommendations to deal with those issues,” said Kate Monk, project coordinator. “The big difference with this watershed strategy is that it incorporates financial information too, so it helps us with budget forecasting.”
Monk says the last Watershed Management Strategy was done about eight years ago and a lot has changed in that time. Monk says the financial aspect is new and this strategy also incorporates climate change.
“We know more information now than we did before and we realize that we need to manage the watershed to be resilient to climate change and to help us adapt to climate change,” she said.
Monk says, at least for the short term, climate change isn’t going to go away so we have to adapt and we have build up the watershed to be as resilient as possible. She added the action they have to take to achieve their goals does cost money so the financial information in the strategy will help them budget and to look to as many sources as possible to get the funding they’ll need.
According to Monk, they’re producing the Strategy internally rather than using consultants and they already have a lot of the background from other reports. Monk says this strategy is a requirement of the Conservation Authority’s Act but they’ll be able to use a lot of the information they already have and just update it to make it current.
