Lawns Campaign / Platform

The vast majority of North American yards are covered in turfgrass, a non-native, intensively managed habitat with low ecological value and minimal biodiversity. Introduced from Europe during the seventeenth century, lawns became the aesthetic norm during the twentieth century, as herbicides and chemical fertilizers became readily available to a growing suburban population.

Today, many homeowners strive to attain the perfect turfgrass lawn as it is a hallmark of homeownership and neighborhood values, and are even obligated to do so following strict municipal by-laws. Unlike other natural landscapes, however, lawns provide very few of the ecosystem services that are essential for maintaining and increasing biodiversity or even regulating local climate.

For example, summer temperatures can be 20 °C higher on lawns than on other ground cover, and intensive pesticide use and mowing practices decrease plant and insect biodiversity. With an estimated six million residential lawns covering about 600,000 hectares in Canada, or roughly 1.5 million football fields, restoring turfgrass into ecologically beneficial habitats would help combat biodiversity loss and increase community resilience to climate change, while empowering Canadians to take tangible climate action.

The platform aims to consolidate various features; it provides information, assists in the concrete transformation of grassed areas, maps and measures the impacts of collective actions and helps visualise possible futures.