Roads fragment landscapes, resulting in barriers to the safe movement of humans and animals. Canada’s growing urban regions and road networks are associated with increasing wildlife-vehicle collisions and in the long-term, landscape fragmentation can result in habitat degradation a decline in biodiversity. Solving these issues is not solely a technical or research challenge; the solutions requires working collaboratively across disciplines and building political, economic, and cultural consensus. There is an emerging public policy and infrastructural design imperative to find new and creative ways to (re)connect our landscapes in support of the safe passage of humans and animals. 

As existing stormwater infrastructure networks begin to age across North America’s urban centres, an opportunity exists to proactively (re)imagine the management of weather impacts in urban spaces at their source. As the effects of climate change and urban growth become increasingly apparent, natural and human-made elements can provide ecological and hydrological functions and processes.

Long-term environmental sustainability demands the capacity for resilience—the ability to recover from a disturbance, to accommodate change, and to function in a state of health. What does a resilient world look like, how does it behave, and how do we plan and design for resilience?  Despite more than two decades of this research, the development of policy and planning strategies related to resilience is relatively recent. An evidence-based approach that contributes to adaptive and ecologically responsive design in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and vulnerability is needed.