New Report Shows Access to Large Parks is Not Equal By Jennifer Court and Thomas Bowers
Large parks have a large impact, providing magnified benefits to both residents and the ecosystem, but access to large parks is not equal for residents across the Golden Horseshoe. This is one of the key findings from the upcoming report Improving Access to Large Parks in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe: Policy, Planning, and Funding Strategies by the Green Infrastructure Ontario Coalition and the Greenbelt Foundation, with support from Re: Public Urbanism, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, and the Ontario Parks Association. This report is a follow-up to the State of Large Parks in Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe, published in 2019. That report was the first-ever regional scale analysis of park supply in the Golden Horseshoe and was intended to inform our understanding of what large parks we have, their capacity, and how this supply will evolve with population projections identified in the growth plan. We found that there is a shortage of large park supply across the region, and that this limited supply will not keep up with population growth if governments do not prioritise large park planning. There is a growing gap in government capacity for planning, funding, establishing, and managing large parks for public recreation and nature appreciation, and there is a need for further research on policy and funding solutions to address this gap. These findings were the inspiration for our new research. In this new report we re-examine the park supply in the Golden Horseshoe from an accessibility and equity perspective, explore the barriers
to establishing and managing additional large parks (including for underserved populations), and identify four key strategies to establishing and managing additional large parks for park planners, funders, and policy makers. Our findings reinforce the critical role of large natural parks, which has grown even more evident in the COVID-19 pandemic with the vast increase in park usage, and the challenges of establishing them in an environment of increasing land values, development, and land scarcity. Parks of all sizes contribute to human health and well-being; however, there are unique and magnified benefits associated with large parks. Large parks are more likely to be used for physical activity, offer better wilderness experiences and are more likely to be used as a natural classroom; they also offer more ecosystem services, help foster biodiversity, and they contribute more to climate change mitigation. In undertaking the accessibility analysis, we made a few key changes to our definition of “large parks” and our approach: we lowered the threshold for large parks from 50 hectares to 20 hectares, to align more closely to municipal definitions, and introduced a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)* to ensure that the focus remained on more natural parks with a significant amount of vegetation. We also expanded our definition of “parks” to include other greenspaces that the public can use for recreation and nature appreciation, such as valley lands and natural corridors, and looked at linear parks and urban river valleys for
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The Green Sward - Spring 2022
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