City planners turn to nature to combat Vancouver's rising sea levels

Vancouver's waterfront has taken a beating in recent months. Storms have left part of the seawall badly damaged and there's a barge stuck on a beach in English Bay.

As climate change and rising sea levels continue to cause problems for coastal communities and their infrastructure, a new initiative from the City of Vancouver is aiming to get ahead of the issue.

Two international, multidisciplinary teams are working on solutions through the Sea2City Design Challenge, a project that aims to look at how the city can adapt to rising sea levels — particularly in the False Creek floodplain — and address the social, economic and ecological impacts coastal flooding will have in the future.

Though the designs the teams come up with won't be constructed immediately, they will help the city figure out where to begin with future planning.

Sea levels could rise up to two metres in the next 80 years, according to experts. 

"It's about being proactive, as opposed to reactive," engineer and challenge participant Begonia Arellano Jaimerena told CBC's Margaret Gallagher.

Arellano Jaimerena works for Dutch engineering firm Delterra, which specializes in water management. About one-third of the Netherlands lies below sea level and the country has had to contend with flooding for centuries.

The country has developed a complex system of dikes, pumps and sand dunes, and has one of the most sophisticated and advanced anti-flood systems in the world.

Arellano Jaimerena said acting sooner rather than later gives designers the ability to make changes slowly.

Vancouver architect Derek Lee said his team is getting creative with nature-based solutions, such as integrating absorbent wetlands into the landscape, creating flood parks and building riparian zones, with plants and habitats that form the shoreline.

"It's not like a heavy handed infrastructure approach to build walls around the creeks, let's say, but more gradual," he said.

Gradual changes means designers can adapt to however we're living in the future; for example, Lee said, we might not be driving cars in the future, and roads could be utilized in new ways.

"Even though that sounds very radical at this point in time, our mobility is changing. Even the way that we live is changing," he added.

He noted that parts of Seattle raised their ground floor by one storey following a fire in 1889 that caused flooding. 

"Some things that we see as impossibilities are indeed possible," he said.

"We're obviously doing them for different reasons, but I think with good planning, with good education within the public domain, we can demonstrate that these are creative and constructive ways of not only changing how we approach the waterfront in Vancouver, but in cities around the world."

Although completed designs haven't been submitted yet, the City said they will be made available in coming months.

They're expecting eight to 12 designs from the project, which will be presented to the public to help raise awareness about the possibilities for Vancouver's shorelines moving forward.

The Sea2City Design Challenge officially wraps up in September, and the City says it will take several years to move forward on research, planning and city council approval of any designs they choose to move forward with.