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Everything you needed to know about NAM (but were afraid to ask)
The guide to getting your wetlands, woodlots, and creeks counted, valued, employed, and maintained like (and sometimes instead of) your roads and pipes.
Greenbelt municipalities are starting to treat natural assets like roads and pipes
Two years after Watson & Associates first benchmarked all 73 Greenbelt municipalities for the Greenbelt Foundation, its 2026 report shows twice as many with natural assets in their plans, and where Watson says the Foundation can help next.
The 2026 Natural Asset Integration Report comes out in November.
More municipalities have taken the steps Watson measured, including those the regulation requires
O. Reg. 588/17 required every municipality to put the natural assets it owns, with their current levels of service, in its asset management plan by July 2024, and to add proposed levels of service and a lifecycle management and financial strategy by July 2025. Watson counted how many of the 73 have taken each step, and how many have used that information in a business case.
municipalities, out of 73, now have natural assets in their asset management plan.
have set proposed levels of service for their natural assets, the service they plan to deliver.
look at the forecast cost of upkeep when they prepare the annual budget.
have used natural asset information to support a business case.
Most began with the natural assets they already look after, like parks, street trees, and forests.
Watson recommends step-by-step guidance for each type of natural asset and each part of the plan, with what the regulation requires marked off from what goes beyond it. This site is a start on it.
1The five steps in Your plan →With a toolkit, staff could show council what looking after natural assets saves, and what happens to services and flood risk when nobody looks after them.
2Taking the plan to council →Staff could adapt plain briefings, written for the councils elected this October, for their first budgets and plans.
3What replacement cost means →Asset managers and natural asset experts would work out valuation, condition and levels of service together, including how to fit natural assets into existing software.
4Who’s already working on this →Municipalities need ways to protect what privately owned natural assets do for them, such as by-laws, official plan policies, enforcement and fines, education for owners, and partnerships with community groups.
5Who’s responsible for this →Two years ago most municipalities asked how to start. Those further along now ask how to pay for the plan.
For them, the questions are about plans councils have already approved: which method to value the assets, how to defend that value, and where the money for upkeep comes from each year.
Grants pay for the inventory and the study. Carrying out the plan takes money every year.
How others found the money →Municipalities that added a position credit it for much of their progress. Some still have less than one full-time person for all of asset management, and when people leave, their knowledge is often lost.
Organizations that can help →The people who know the ecology and the people who know the plan work in different departments, and neither has all of it. Some municipalities found their asset management consultants didn’t know natural assets either.
The five steps, with who helps →When looking after a wetland works, the flood doesn’t happen, so there’s nothing to point to. One council approved its natural asset plan but not the yearly money to keep the assets working, and asked what return it would get on spending that only keeps things as they are. Others support the work in principle without funding it.
Stories of making the case to council →There’s no agreed way yet to value a wetland, assess a shoreline’s condition or set a level of service for a woodlot, so staff hold back numbers they can’t defend.
The methods municipalities are using (step 2) →In one Greenbelt municipality, more than half the trees are on private property. An asset management plan covers what the municipality owns, but the services it counts on come from natural assets on both sides of the property line.
Who’s responsible for natural assets →Councils now weigh natural assets against housing growth, electrification and the roads budget for money, land and time. Municipalities that made progress wrote natural assets into documents such as their asset management policy, official plan or engineering guidelines, so natural assets have formal standing when council sets priorities.
What the regulation requires →Asset management software and GIS were built for assets with service lives and replacement costs. Inventories built from conservation authority mapping need reworking before the software can use them.
Tell us how you did it →Invasive species can wear down a woodlot while it still looks healthy, and controlling them takes operating money every year. Changing temperatures and rainfall, and more wildfires and storms, also change the upkeep a natural asset needs.
Planning the upkeep (step 5) →