Explosive urbanization – not unlike what has transpired in and around Calgary and Canmore in the past few decades – and its effects on local water supply dominated discussions at the Rosenberg International Forum on Water Policy in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Several Canadians were among 52 water experts invited from 28 countries around the world to participate in the seventh biennial Rosenberg forum to examine the state of water management in the Western Hemisphere in November.
“It is interesting to note that the theme that ultimately completely dominated the forum was the problem of rapid urbanization,” said Bob Sandford, Canadian chair of the United Nations Water for Life initiative, who participated in the forum along with fellow Canmorite Dr. John Pomeroy, Canada research chair in water resource and climate change at the University of Saskatchewan.
The Canadian delegation also included Michael Miltenberger, Northwest Territories’ deputy premier and minister of environment, Lorne Taylor, chair of the Alberta Water Research Institute, its science director, Sasha Zehnder and Rob deLoë, University of Waterloo research chair in water policy and governance.
“Explosive urbanization is having unexpected effects on water supply, water quality and sanitation, not just within affected municipalities, but widely throughout the regions that surround them,” Sandford said. “Currently, global human population growth is the highest in places where there is the least water. Think of Africa, the Middle East and parts of Latin America. Think, too, of the U.S. sunbelt. But think also of Alberta and southern B.C.”
Canada, Sandford states, is a mirror of what is happening globally. In the 20th century, the global human population has grown fourfold, and urban populations increased by 13 times. During the same period, Canada’s population grew six-fold; Alberta’s population was multiplied by 44.
In addition to explosive population growth, two other trends emerged at the forefront of forum discussions: growing competition between cities and agriculture for water, and the growing realization of how much water nature needs, not just to perpetuate the hydrological cycle, but to sustain planetary life-support system function.
“There was complete consensus at the forum that water policy must respond to all these issues if we are to avoid a crisis of scarcity in many places in North, Central and South America,” Sandford said. “And in Alberta, our population is growing rapidly; there are greater demands on increasingly stressed water supplies and rising municipal and industrial demands. This is all occurring at a time when we are uncertain about how changes in our climate will affect the security of our water supply. We have to realize that our major cities in Alberta are almost all in – or what in the future will likely be in – areas of water scarcity.”
Other significant shared problems identified at the forum include changes to water availability and cycles due to climate change; unsustainable groundwater use; the failure to address the issue of indigenous water rights; matters related to environmental protection; and transboundary water issues.
Ironically, while countries around the world, including Argentina, envy Canada’s current state of water resources, Canada is in the process of marching right off the same gangplank Argentina and other countries slipped off decades ago.
A century of rampant waste due to an ideology of limitless supply available at next to no cost evolved into a situation where underfunded utilities providers could not keep up with crucial maintenance. Today, 75 per cent of Latin America’s lakes and streams have been eutrophied as a result of nutrient loading and pesticide contamination from upstream agricultural areas – a fate already lapping at Manitoba’s Lake Winnipeg. Outdated infrastructure cannot cope with storms of increasing intensity due to climate change.
“They are looking at us, astonished,” Sandford said. “They are all trying to work their way back to where we are now, while we are working toward where they are – completely unnecessarily. The myth of limitless abundance is the greatest of all threats to water security. It allows wasteful habits to become cultural traditions and then inalienable rights for which citizens will often fight bitterly against all common sense to maintain.”
Canada’s past – and enviable – position as a world leader in water studies and environmental management throughout the 1960s, ’70, ’80s has fallen drastically. During that proud and productive period of research, the Department of Inland Waters studied and enumerated all of Canada’s lakes and rivers, as well as climate-related water issues, all of which served to produce significant baseline foundations.
Unfortunately, that department was absorbed into Environment Canada in the late 1980s and since then, all research efforts and projects have experienced steady decline as a result of successive government cuts.
“What Canada did with acid rain and in reaction to ozone depletion was really, really significant,” Sandford said. “The proceedings of the Rosenberg Forum indicate that compared to other countries in the Western Hemisphere, at the federal level, at least, Canada appears to have abandoned the environment. We’ve allowed that to decline by hollowing out science, reducing monitoring, regulation and enforcement capacity.”
According to the recently released 2010 Fall Report of the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, neither this country’s Fresh Water Quality Monitoring program nor the National Hydrometric Program have been sufficiently managed to adequately monitor and report on the quality and quantity of Canada’s surface fresh water resources.
“Many of the essential management practices needed to do so have not been put in place by either program,” said the report’s author, Scott Vaughan. “Environment Canada does not know whether the greatest risks to water quality and quantity are being monitored. Canadians need water data and information for many purposes, such as determining the environmental effects of projects; understanding emerging threats, including climate change and the cumulative effects of economic development; and guiding decisions associated with federal water arrangements and regulations, as well as energy, agriculture, industrial and urban development. At present, good quality data and information may not be available when and where it is needed.”
“While other countries are all putting out the resources to learn more and do more, we’re doing less and less – just at the time when we really need it,” Sandford said.
Rather than looking to other countries that have already battled some of the big problems poised to flow down our national pipes in the not-too-distant future, Canada has modelled its water policies after the fragmented, judicious and institutionalized territoriality that characterizes the way the U.S. manages its water resources. As a result, this country is heading rapidly toward the same kinds of problems that prevent addressing serious water problems that now confront more than half the U.S. states, particularly the U.S. southwest, much of which has a climate similar to Alberta’s.
While premiers and environment ministers from all the provinces and territories are focussing significant energies toward water concerns, they are doing so in isolation of each other, and of Ottawa.
“The proceedings of the Water for the Americas summit make it clear that successful water management in any country demands not only full support from, but the leadership of, municipalities in the establishment, implementation, enforcement and on-going evaluation of enlightened water management policies,” Sandford said.
“By demonstrating the importance of preventing self-interested, ideology-based leadership from dominating political office, the forum underscored the importance of a functional, civically-engaged democracy.
“The forum also reminded all who attended that water touches every aspect of our being. Canada can learn an enormous amount from forums like this. Because others have been where we are now before us, we should learn from them.”
