Within a quarter century, more than one million newcomers are expected to settle on B.C.'s south coast between Pemberton and Hope. How and where they live will make or break the B.C. government's new plan to tackle global warming.
Will people flock to Vancouver's West End or Yaletown, Metrotown in Burnaby or downtown New Westminster? Utopian regional plans call for population growth in high-density, highly urban centres -- neighbourhoods where people would live in compact, energy-efficient homes, walk to nearby workplaces and shops, and easily get access to public transit.
Or will the people sprawl through Surrey, north along the Sea-to-Sky corridor and eastward in the Fraser Valley? Will they live in big energy-guzzling homes on suburban streets lacking public transit, and drive autos to distant workplaces, schools and grocery stores?
Premier Gordon Campbell has declared a provincial goal of slashing greenhouse-gas emissions to 10 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. But that green dream relies heavily on how people live on the Mainland's south coast, where, say experts, massive changes are needed to regional infrastructure.
The recommended changes are so huge it would be easy to succumb to a sense of futility. "What is politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant, and what is ecologically necessary is politically impossible," said William Rees, an environmental economist at the University of B.C. and the inventor of the ecological footprint, a tool used worldwide to measure human impact on the environment.
Politics and personal choices are driven largely by economics -- and the structure of all economic incentives now will increase rather than decrease B.C.'s greenhouse-gas emissions, several experts told The Globe and Mail.
Without major smokestack industries, greenhouse gases are generated mostly from transportation and household energy use, with consumption of goods a distant third. And while polls repeatedly suggest that people now rank climate change as the most important public-policy issue, they also suggest that very few are willing to change their lives to stop it.
"There are incentives to consume, not to conserve," said Lawrence Frank, who holds the Bombardier Chair in Sustainable Transportation at the University of B.C.
Because of the high square-footage cost in urban living, it's cheaper and logical to choose spacious suburban homes over urban areas, he said, even when factoring in the cost of cars. "People could choose to live in neighbourhoods that don't require that they drive for all daily needs, with tremendous environmental benefits, but it would be their gift to society, a donation to society."
Vancouver is pushing to increase density, but it is just one of 22 jurisdictions in the Greater Vancouver Regional District, and no local body oversees the region from the Sea-to-Sky corridor to the north or the eastern regions of the Fraser Valley, where recent census data shows that Abbotsford has one of Canada's highest population growth rates.
Chris Elliott, local vice-president with the World Wildlife Fund, which runs a One Planet program aimed at helping cities become sustainable, said regional decisions now will affect B.C.'s carbon footprint for the long term, and most of the key questions involve transportation: "We can either have Los Angeles-style traffic jams or investment in public transport."
B.C. Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon recently said the government will accept most recommendations from an independent review of the Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority. It called for a revamped public transit system that would receive steady funds from a fuel-tax surcharge, property taxes and transit fees, and cover a vast area from Pemberton to Vancouver to Hope, serving a population expected to grow to 3.4 million people from 2.2 million within 24 years.
But at the same time, the province is planning to expand highways and twin the Port Mann Bridge to position B.C. as the transportation gateway between North American and Asian markets.
