Topic: Health & Social Planning

Sustainable Neighbourhood Development

This guide provides top-line, how-to information about the planning and development of sustainable neighbourhoods, offering practical solutions to common challenges. It answers
important questions about sustainable neighbourhood development:

What is a sustainable neighbourhood, and how can I make the case for pursuing this kind of development?
What are the major challenges, and how can they be overcome?
Where else in Canada has this been done successfully, and what factors led to that success?
Where can I go for more in-depth information?

Sustainable Community Planning

The goal of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC’s) research on sustainable community planning is to encourage neighbourhood design and land use planning approaches that reduce costs and environmental impacts, while maintaining community livability. Our research provides best practices in design and development, tools for planners and designers, and practical information for your home.

Six Steps to Sustainable Community: A Guide to Local Action Planning

Local action planning is the process of creating a strategic document that outlines specifically how your municipality will achieve a selected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction target. The resulting document, called a local action plan (LAP), is the third milestone in the Partners for Climate Protection (PCP) program.

This guide covers the development of a community-wide local action plan (LAP), that is, Milestone Three in the PCP program. The information provided here also applies to the development of an LAP for a corporation or similar organization — although with some minor procedural differences. (For example, internal working group meetings are held instead of public consultations.)

The step-by-step overview in the next section, Begin planning, shows how an LAP is developed. All of the steps are illustrated with examples from planning undertaken by PCP members. The subsequent section, Sustainability Snapshots, profiles 11 communities at various stages of the LAP process. All but one are PCP members. The remaining sections offer insights, lessons learned and additional resources to guide your municipality as it designs its own LAP.

The Green Infrastructure Guide: Issues, Implementation Strategies and Success Stories

The Green Infrastructure Guide provides guidance on how local governments while using legal and policy strategies, encourage or require more sustainable infrastructure designs.

The guide refers readers to strategies, and highlights case studies of local governments that have already taken steps to incorporate a green infrastructure approach. The focus is on implementation mechanisms, issues and barriers, and on what lessons have been learned from experiences to date.

Residential Food Waste Prevention – ToolKit for Local Government and Non-Government Organizations

Uneaten leftovers and spoiled food make up over 25% of the waste discarded from a household. The Ministry produced a Residential Food Waste Prevention toolkit as a resource that helps local governments or non-governmental organizations address avoidable food waste from households. It describes different program models and their components, and provides guidance for identifying suitable approaches, based on a community’s size, capacity, and priorities.

This report provides the rationale and a summary of tools for BC municipalities to make a business case for food waste reduction programs. The tools and resources summarized within this report are intended to create opportunities for BC municipalities to begin to implement food waste reduction programs and demonstrate leadership on the issue.

A Seat at the Table

This resource guide is designed to assist local governments promote food security and support food systems in BC. It showcases a sample of the wide range of innovative projects being developed or supported by local governments across the province.

It includes examples that are meant to pique your curiosity and inspire you to action, whether your community is just starting out or well on its way to creating a strong and healthy food system.

Download it here