REVIEW AND ANALYSIS 23 HERITAGE CONSERVATION and the TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE DONOVAN RYPKEMA CALGARY, ALBERTA, Canada might not come immediately to mind as a city at the cutting edge of heritage conservation policy. Although a very young city in European terms, it is approaching 150 year since its founding. It is a western provincial capital with a population of 1.3 million and is the centre of Canada’s oil and gas industry. While fossil fuel production remains critical to the economy, it is transitioning to other energy sources including major wind and solar facilities. There are six world heritage sites in the province, although all are in the natural heritage category. But Calgarians also pride themselves on being part of a ‘lifestyle city’, with a growing number of creative industries and an increasing reputation as a culinary capital. Calgary is a city with its eye firmly on the future. One manifestation of that perspective is the integration of the ‘triple bottom line’ (TBL) into their municipal governance. Nearly 20 years ago, Calgary recognised that to advance the council’s vision to ‘create and sustain a vibrant, healthy, safe and caring community’ it made sense to embed the triple bottom line approach into corporate policies, performance measures, actions and implementation procedures, and to support decision making. WHAT IS THE TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE APPROACH? There is growing recognition for the idea that corporations should not only measure and report their financial results but also their environmental and social impacts: people, planet, profit. First proposed in 1994 by the English writer and consultant John Elkington in the Harvard Business Review, the approach was modeled on the UN’s sustainable development framework: social responsibility, environmental responsibility and economic responsibility. Since then, hundreds of corporations around the world have adopted some form of the triple bottom line approach, but in local government fewer authorities have seen the logic of incorporating the TBL into their budgeting and policy decision processes: Calgary is one of the exceptions. The city’s Heritage Planning Department wanted an evaluation and monetisation of all three of the TBL elements in four of the city’s commercial areas. Each of these business districts had a concentration of heritage buildings. As a result of a competitive process, a team assembled by the Canadian architectural firm Lemay was chosen for the assignment. The team consisted of Lemay, one local and one national real estate firm and the American consulting firm, Heritage Strategies International (HSI). Lemay had the primary responsibility for calculating the environmental value while HSI did the economic and social value estimates. The two real estate firms provided extensive data on the local real estate market. The assignment was a particularly challenging one in that no example was found worldwide where a city had calculated a triple bottom line monetised value of its heritage resources. The environmental value was based on assigning dollar amounts to four measurable costs: 1) embodied energy in the existing building; 2) landfill costs of demolition materials; 3) embodied energy in the construction of a replacement building; and 4) the cost of embodied carbon. A typical building in one of the districts was chosen as a representative example of heritage buildings. The calculation of each of the four measures was made for the case study building. The per square foot cost was then applied to all of the heritage buildings in the four commercial districts. Based on this approach, the environmental value of the heritage Heritage buildings in downtown Calgary (All images: Heritage Strategies International)
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