When it comes to water, Alberta can easily sink to have-not status
Special to Globe and Mail Update May 2, 2008
In periods of changing climate, winners can quickly become losers — and vice-versa, especially when it comes to the ready availability of fresh water. In that regard, Alberta is emerging as the province to watch as the effects of anthropogenic global heating play out across Canada.
Even in the 20th century, now known to be the wettest of the past several, some parts of southern Alberta had average evaporation that exceeded average precipitation. Without water from the snow packs and glaciers of the Rockies, there would be no cities or agriculture in these areas.
Canadians like to think they are blessed with abundant water; a quick glance at a map would seem to bear them out. From northern Quebec’s mighty rivers, to the Great Lakes, to the myriad rivers and lakes that carve up our North, we seem to be blessed with all the water we need. But viewed from the perspective of renewable supplies — the amount of fresh water that is fully replaced in any given year by rain or snow, and that accumulates in our rivers and streams before flowing out to sea — Canada has just 7 per cent of the world’s total, an amount equal to its share of the world’s land mass.
Proportionately, Alberta has much, much less. In fact, Alberta’s share of Canada’s renewable freshwater is a scant 2.2 per cent. Compounding problems, 80 per cent of that tiny share is found in the province’s north, where oil-sands companies are the big water consumers, while 80 per cent of Alberta’s population is in the south.
Such uncomfortable truths underlie a number of budding disputes over access to diminishing water supplies in the province. The big question is whether those disputes fester until they reach the crisis point or whether new, conservation-oriented approaches to water management and allocation are embraced. The answer may well determine whether Alberta finds itself on the plus or minus side of the ledger in our warming world.
Grave as the ecological and social consequences of water scarcity are, issues of water availability and management were scarcely spoken of during the recent Alberta election campaign. As a report, published April 22, by Ecojustice, a leading Canadian environmental law organization, and Bow Riverkeeper, one of Alberta’s pre-eminent water conservation groups, illustrates, perhaps they should have been.
Fight to the Last Drop: A Glimpse Into Alberta’s Water Future offers two sobering examples of how water shortages are playing out in southern Alberta. Both occurred last year.
In the first, proponents of a massive casino, horse racing track and shopping mall project north of Calgary known as the Balzac development proposed piping water to the site from the Red Deer River Valley, more than 200 kilometres away. Only after sustained public outcry to the proposed water transfer did the developer negotiate a water purchase agreement with Alberta’s Western Irrigation District which, along with other irrigation districts in southern Alberta, controls three-quarters of the region’s water supplies.
The second involved a blanket proposal by the Eastern Irrigation District to amend two of its water licences — a precursor to a potentially massive reallocation of water from farming and irrigation. Only after public opposition to the amendment, which failed to indicate who would get the water and for what purposes, was the proposal covering 900 billion litres of water postponed, pending a provincial government review.
The report’s authors credit the Alberta government for launching the review, which is meant to address whether irrigation districts, in future, will be able to do what the EID hoped to do and become water brokers, essentially selling the water to whatever buyers they wish.
But they correctly assert that members of the public ought to be full participants in that review, given the enormity of water challenges facing Albertans. As report co-author and Ecojustice lawyer Randy Christensen points out, “The sale of water rights in Alberta, without robust regulations to protect the public interest and the environment, poses major risks for aquatic ecosystems and public access to sustainable supplies of clean freshwater and would set a dangerous precedent for Canada.”
And at precisely the worst time, it should be added. In The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, anthropologist Brian Fagan illustrates the fate of human societies around the globe during the so-called Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 800 AD to 1,300. While the rising warmth made for winners — England, for example, grew grapes and exported wine to France — it had more than its share of losers. It was during this time, for example, that Lake Cahuilla, then one of the largest lakes in North America at some 185 kilometres in length, 56 kilometres in width and up to 96 metres deep, began to rapidly dry up. And as the lake (now California desert) disappeared, so, too, did native communities that had thrived on harvesting the lake’s once abundant shellfish, fish and waterfowl populations.
Today, we find ourselves on the cusp of a new climate, one reliably predicted to bring warmer and drier conditions to many parts of the globe. Making the right water choices today is essential if Alberta is to avoid a similarly harsh transition from have to have-not status.
David Schindler is a Killam Memorial Professor of Ecology at the University of Alberta and winner of the 2006 Tyler Prize for Environmental Science.