Risks great for waterways: World Wildlife Fund
OTTAWA — Canada can no longer pretend it is a country rich with pristine lakes and rivers, the World Wildlife Fund said Monday in a report into the country’s waterways.
After four years of research, the conservation organization concluded that one-third of Canada’s 167 watersheds are experiencing high levels of disturbance due to everything from pollution and overuse to climate change and hydroelectric development.
Every watershed in Canada is seeing some impact from climate change, with three-quarters seeing a moderate or high impact, said David Miller, president of the WWF.
“Scientists call it stress,” said Miller. “I would call it a threat. That’s a real worry.”
The research produced a score for each watershed in four areas — water flow, water quality, the health of fish and the health of invertebrates such as snails, leeches and bugs.
The data revealed that more than one-third are so polluted it is of serious concern, while onequarter have poor or fair water quality and one-fifth have water flow issues due to hydro dams, the WWF said.
But decades of government cuts to monitoring programs mean there isn’t enough data to give a full picture of watershed health, the report said; in 110 of the 167 watersheds, there wasn’t enough to data to produce a score in at least two of the four areas.
Information on fish and invertebrates was particularly lacking, said the report.
Invertebrates are extremely sensitive to ecological disturbances and are a good marker of the health of a watershed but 112 of the 167 watersheds have no good data available.
“Where the data was available about the health, we do see there are some pretty significant health concerns and that implies when we start to see more data, we’ll see more health concerns,” Miller said.
The WWF wants Ottawa to set national standards and a national database for what needs to be reported on watersheds.
Much of the data is collected by provincial and municipal governments but there are no federal requirements to do so, which is why some watersheds have data and others don’t, Miller said.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna is in Europe for a G7 ministerial meeting as well as a meeting at the Vatican.
In a statement, her office pointed to $197 million Canada set aside in 2016 to improve ocean and freshwater science and monitoring but did not address directly the WWF’s call for a national database of information that is publicly available.