Natural assets

Walking the path to nature-positive communities

This award recognizes a program or project that demonstrates innovative approaches to including natural assets (such as watersheds, wetlands, and forests) in municipal asset management processes and community services.

Applicants need to demonstrate how they have accessed and analyzed relevant data about their municipal natural assets to help their municipality better integrate them into sustainable service delivery and/or provide a climate change resilience benefit. Special considerations will be given to initiatives that demonstrate a strong integration of biodiversity considerations and significant efforts to restore or enhance the ecological functions of a site or community to improve overall community resilience to climate change. Plans, strategies and projects are eligible. 

Examples of eligible initiatives:

• The implementation of new asset management systems or processes that integrate natural assets or ecosystem services that contribute to the provision of everyday municipal services.
• Initiatives that demonstrate how municipal natural assets provide a climate change resilience benefit.
• Renewal of natural assets done in a way that restores, protects and increases community resiliency.
• Initiatives that restore and protect local biodiversity and ecosystem health, such as restoration projects of lost natural systems (e.g. “daylighting” streams and rivers).
• Initiatives that demonstrate nature-based solutions as a key part of the local government’s path to net-zero and nature-positive resilience.
• Urban forestry management strategies, reforestation programs and projects that aim to improve the resilience of urban tree canopies.
• Brownfield redevelopment done in a way that restores natural assets and services.
• Land use developments that recognize and integrate natural systems into their planning.

Who can apply?

All Canadian municipalities and their partners are eligible to apply for an FCM Sustainable Communities Award.

Learn about one of our 2022 natural asset management category winners, a group of partners in the Georgian Bay Mnidoo Gamii Biosphere who turned road construction into conservation success and saved more than 3,500 turtle eggs.

Learn about another one of our 2022 natural asset management category winners, the Alberta municipality of Parkland County, who completed a project involving mapping, modelling and analysis to better understand the value of ecosystems and build a quantifiable business case for preserving and restoring them not only within their own borders, but across municipal boundaries as well.

In spring 2024, the Green Municipal Fund will launch its new Local Leadership for Climate Adaptation and Growing Canada’s Community Canopies initiatives. Keep an eye out to learn how we can support the next steps in your natural asset management projects.

Applications are now closed. Winners will be announced in 2025.