Resource Library

This project aims to establish and apply a method to evaluate the biodiversity of the Park Board's golf and pitch and putt courses and make recommendations for enhancing biodiversity on the golf courses. The results will contribute to the Golf Strategy to be initiated in 2020 and improve understanding of how these spaces contribute to biodiversity, climate change mitigation and access to nature for a growing population.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: biodiversity, ecological systems, sustainability in education

Through the Greenest City Action Plan and other strategies, the City of Vancouver strives to provide residents with access to nature. However, access to nature is a subjective experience that is difficult to plan for and measure. This report proposes a definition and mapping criteria for measuring and monitoring access to nature in Vancouver based on synthesized findings from a public engagement survey, interviews, a literature review, and a policy scan.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: ecological systems, social sustainability

This project explores behaviour change approaches for a future campaign to encourage the voluntary adoption of operational changes by the grocery retail sector in Vancouver to reduce the occurrence of wasted food and associated GHG emissions. These changes are integral to the City of Vancouver achieving zero waste by 2040 and becoming a leading city in food waste prevention.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: food systems, waste management & recycling

This project aims to monitor the early stages of how ride-hailing impacts Vancouver in terms of congestion and climate change. The report recommends policies that the City should consider implementing/adopting by quantifying, at a high level, the early stages of ride-hailing impacts. The work involved qualitative research to investigate curb management, congestion pricing and electric vehicles. The quantitative research is based on 4 months of data from Lyft.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: transportation

The intention of this report is to provide policymakers with a general framework for approaching walkability, starting with a purely technical perspective and advancing towards a human-centred intersectional approach. The report also reviews the most common tools to measure different dimensions of walkability and explore the general findings of the existing literature. After reviewing this document, readers will know how to measure walkability and the limitations of their chosen methodology.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: social sustainability, sustainable development & green economy, transportation

This project focuses on the existing electrical system of single-family homes in the Vancouver area and the barriers to adding to the electric load when a system is either outdated or has limited capacity for expansion. It talks about the cost of service upgrades, technical challenges that occur, the benefits of electrifying a home, and potential technological solutions that can manage load demand and reduce energy usage and utility bills.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: green buildings

This research project aims to identify the issues presented by the COVID-19 pandemic and how they might push people into poverty; and the impact of COVID-19 on people already living in poverty. The report includes several examples of COVID-19 recovery policies and projects being implemented elsewhere that could support people experiencing poverty in Vancouver.

Partner: City of Vancouver
Keywords: social sustainability, sustainable development & green economy

The project was commissioned to provide an analytic and synthesized energy poverty profile from the Census 2016 dataset for the City of Abbotsford. The results of this analysis will help the City develop climate action plans and policies to reduce GHG emissions while providing for vulnerable and marginalized groups affected by blanket energy policy interventions. The report shows tha significant numbers of senior, lone-parent and racialized households experience energy poverty. 

Partner: City of Abbotsford & CUSP
Keywords: green buildings, energy poverty

This project supports the planned renewal of the Regional Ground-Level Ozone Strategy (RGLOS) for Metro Vancouver. Specifically, the project investigated the background levels of ground-level ozone from the decommissioned Marine Boundary Layer Station (MBLS) in Ucluelet, B.C. One main focus was to find the underlying trend of background ozone over the seven years of operation of the MBLS after removing for seasonality and other contributing variables.
The project also explored the impact of precursor emissions on MBLS background ozone levels, classified geographic source regions of ozone levels on a given day based on back-trajectories, and compared MBLS to ozone trend levels at other Pacific Northwest monitoring stations.

Partner: Metro Vancouver
Keywords: air quality