WC134 JanFeb 2024 - Magazine - Page 26
UTILITY MANAGEMENT
The City of Saskatoon uses a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) Policy and Framework to incorporate equity into its decision-making processes.
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WATER C AN ADA • JANUARY/ FEBRUARY 2024
reviews, and factors such as affordability or barriers are considered. Barriers could include anything from potentially exclusionary qualification criteria to language barriers.
“We facilitate reviews that bring together diverse perspectives
with the goal of maximizing benefits and avoiding undesirable
environmental, social, or economic trade-offs in the community,”
explains Jeanna South, director of sustainability with the City of
Saskatoon. “It’s an important part of how we are learning as an
organization and improving our own understanding of equity
challenges.” While completing the long-term capital development plans for the wastewater and water treatment plants, TPL
principles were fully integrated into decision-making alongside
traditional criteria such as regulatory pressure, finance, and safety.
Equity and climate adaptation
Anticipated cost escalations for municipal infrastructure,
compounded by climate change, necessitate that cities must
implement solutions that are both environmentally and fiscally
sustainable, and that also address local environmental inequity.
Extreme weather events often have the greatest impact on lowWAT E R C A N A D A . N E T
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water equity. “Water quality indicators, operation and maintenance activities, asset replacement programs—the data, when it
is collected into a common data repository, makes it possible to
be cross-referenced with socioeconomic metrics on each service
area, to form a more complete understanding of the barriers that
customers experience.”
Xylem, with support from Esri, has demonstrated the potential
value of mapping key data indicators so that U.S. municipalities
better understand water inequity distribution in their communities. Xylem’s Water Equity Lens is a data-driven water equity
benchmarking tool that helps U.S. communities identify areas
to target for investment to improve water equity. It aims to fill
the gap in understanding how water and wastewater services and
programs are distributed based on access, benefits, and resilience.
In Canada, the City of Saskatoon integrates equity using a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) Policy and Framework. The TBL Policy
requires that environmental, social, and economic considerations
be included within the organization’s decision-making processes.
Project teams undertake a project review process to explore various sustainability factors. Equity is a major component of these
