Municipal Natural Asset Management as a Sustainable Infrastructure Strategy: The emerging evidence

This paper documents an emerging strategy to manage natural assets such as woodlands, wetlands, and creeks in urban areas as part of a sustainable infrastructure strategy. Specifically, the paper explores Canadian local government experience through the Municipal Natural Assets Initiative (MNAI) to identify, value, and account for natural assets’ contribution to municipal government service delivery, services that would otherwise need to be delivered by engineered assets. Evidence from MNAI suggests that a structured, asset management-based approach holds great promise to tackle the twin challenges of declining urban infrastructure quality and declining ecosystem health and could have applicability well beyond Canada.