BC Government Land Development BMPs
Source: BC Ministry of Environment (www.env.gov.bc.ca/wld/documents/bmp/devwithcare/DWC-Cover.pdf)
The BC Ministry of Environment (MOE) has created the ‘Develop With Care 2014: Environmental Guidelines for Urban and Rural Land Development in British Columbia‘ as a guidance document “for use by local governments, the development community, landowners and environmental organizations as a comprehensive guide to maintaining environmental values during the development of urban and rural lands”. This BMP document is made available online through MOE’s website. There are many sections to the document, covering BC’s different regions, as well as factsheets on different land uses and sentinel wildlife species to consider during land development in BC. Also included on the website are links to relevant complimentary documents, including herptile conservation, raptor conservation, air quality, and urban ungulate conflict.
Ease of Locating Information
As a prospective user of urban and rural land development BMPs (i.e. Develop With Care 2014), it can be challenging locating the right resources.
For example, if you are a responsible developer in the city of North Vancouver and you are proactively searching online for information on ‘sediment prevention in BC’ there are a number of websites that come up on the first page of a web search. None of the search results include the Develop with Care 2014. In fact, the only BC Government web resource that comes up is MOE’s General BMPs and Standard Project Considerations, which is relevant to instream works, the protection of fish habitat, and the release of deleterious substances. A search for ‘sediment prevention bmp bc’ yields a link to MOE’s Environmental Planning and Development at the Site Level document (Section 4 in Environmental Best Management Practices for Urban and Rural Land Development), yet this document is from 2004 and is out-of-date.
Another avenue a responsible developer might use to locate pertinent BMPs for a prospective development is to contact the BC Government directly. An internet search for ‘Ministry of Environment contact’ leads to MOE’s contact page where the developer can then contact the head office in Victoria, or find other branches by division or region. Other than calling the head office or the ‘Lower Mainland Region’ office, it would be difficult to decipher which division is responsible for land development BMPs, and might require some phoning around to locate the correct contact.
ENAT Inc. interviewed a developer, Bob TheBuilder, in North Vancouver to get a potential BMP user perspective on the Develop With Care 2014 manual. Watch the interview on our videos page.
User-friendliness of the BMP document
ENAT Inc. also investigated the user-friendliness of the BMP document. Watch the video on our videos page.