Nature is Infrastructure: How to Include Natural Assets in Asset Management Plans

This Guidebook provides direction and insight for Canadian local governments who are seeking to undertake natural asset management through asset management planning.

As natural asset management is a relatively new practice, standard terms and approaches for its integration into municipal asset management frameworks. This Guidebook helps close the gap between mainstream practices, infrastructure challenges, and natural asset solutions by aligning natural asset management with approaches already in place for built assets while:

1. Using the most current and widely adopted lexicon for natural assets
2. Recognizing that natural assets have some unique attributes and functions (e.g., much longer or indefinite lifecycles) that do not always allow them to fit neatly into the same “boxes” as built assets
3. Providing specific guidance on how to meet Ontario’s asset management regulation O. Reg 588/17 requirements related to green infrastructure

Nature is Infrastructure: How to Include Natural Assets in Asset Management Plans was generously supported by the Greenbelt Foundation and the Municipal Finance Officers’ Association of Ontario (MFOA). Special thanks to all local government and Ontario Conservation Authority staff for their contributions to this guidebook.

Editor’s note: a previous version of this document listed “Land Ownership” as a dataset category in Table 3; this has been corrected to Land Cover on April 24, 2024.