Pamela Zevit

Title: Biodiversity Conservation in the City of Surrey

Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth. You’ll find biodiversity all around you: plants and animals, microscopic organisms, and even habitats they all rely on to survive. Healthy, diverse ecosystems give us “natural services” like clean water to drink, soil to grow our food, and the outdoor spaces we love to live near and play in.

Endorsed by Council in 2014, the Biodiversity Conservation Strategy recognizes Surrey’s biodiversity as a key foundation of a healthy, livable, and sustainable City. The goal of the Strategy is to preserve, protect, and enhance Surrey’s biodiversity in the long-term by:

• Identifying and measuring current biodiversity and habitat resources
• Establishing management approaches for the Green Infrastructure Network
• Setting conservation targets for natural areas and indicator species
• Recommending policies and procedures that support various objectives in the Strategy
• Creating a monitoring program for biodiversity indicators to measure the success of the strategy over time.

The BCS Policy Recommendations support and build on existing City policies, including the Official Community Plan, the Sustainability Charter, Climate Adaptation Strategy and Parks, Recreation and Culture Strategic Plan.

Pamela Zevit Bio

My career path has reflected a passion for affecting change and has helped to culture long-lasting relationships with a diversity of government and non-government, academic, conservation and sustainability leaders and industry interests. I am a Registered Professional Biologist who has mainly worked on local and regional actions to conserve natural capital as well as improving collaboration between public and private sectors. My focus has been on endangered species and biodiversity conservation, environmental literacy and landscape ecology. I have mainly been involved on the South Coast of BC and broader provincial conservation issues since 1995, first as a conservation planner for the Province of BC and after leaving the Province in 2004 as an independent adviser, researcher and consultant. Starting in 2010 I took on the role as Program Coordinator for the South Coast Conservation Program until I began a new phase of my career in 2019 as the Biodiversity Conservation Planner for the City of Surrey in southwest BC.

Goals: To build a legacy of ecological literacy and stewardship among decision makers and local citizenry through reconciling the conflicts between human and non-human resource needs and improving the trust between society and science practitioners.

Pamela Zevit RPBio | Biodiversity Conservation Planner

Parks Division, Urban Forestry Section

6651 148 St., Surrey, BC, Canada V3S 3C7