‘IT’S JUST LIKE SOMEBODY TURNED THE TAPS OFF’
New report urges B.C. to learn from drought-ravaged California as we brace for significant water shortages this year
A volunteer walks up a dry riverbed while rescuing juvenile salmon in a tributary of the Cowichan River. Water officials say Vancouver Island is facing ‘a grim situation.’
Parker Jefferson lives beside the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island. Every spring, he heads into the creeks and streams to rescue juvenile salmon.
This spring, Jefferson said, has been “just shocking — week to week, it would be half the size it was the previous week, and then it’s completely dry.”
“The first week in May was when we really started to notice — the tributaries to Lake Cowichan, it’s just like somebody turned the taps off.”
They’ve seen dry years in the past, Jefferson said, but this one looks like it could be as bad as or worse than any he can remember.
Rodger Hunter, Cowichan Watershed Board co-ordinator, said the water level in the lake is already “much, much lower” than it should be at this time of year. Unless summer brings “miracle” rains, Hunter said, the river could soon be “a trickle, compared to what it should be.”
This week, the B.C. government issued a statement urging all municipal, agricultural and industrial users on Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and Haida Gwaii to reduce water use by 20 per cent or more, anticipating the possibility of “significant water supply shortages in 2015.”
Hunter said: “The forecast isn’t good. This looks like a grim situation.”
In a report published Wednesday, B.C. water law experts warn the province’s policy-makers to learn from the cautionary lessons of California, now in the fourth year of a historic severe drought.
The B.C. government is currently at work on the regulations for the Water Sustainability Act, which comes into effect Jan. 1, 2016. Those regulations will be crucial to ensuring the WSA can actually achieve water sustainability, and the provincial government should look seriously at what’s unfolded to the south, said report coauthor Oliver Brandes, POLIS Project director.
Closer to B.C., the governor of Washington declared a statewide drought emergency last month, and the state projected a $1.2-billion crop loss this year due to drought.
B.C. is unlikely to soon experience a provincewide emergency quite like California’s drought, which has already cost the state billions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs, according to estimates.
But despite the differences between B.C. and California, the new report argues, vital lessons can be learned from the Golden State’s example.
The report’s conclusion reads: “If B.C. doesn’t fundamentally address the issues being faced today, sometime in the not-so-distant future, B.C. could be in a multi-year drought like California.”
Water scarcity is likely to hit parts of B.C. with increasing frequency, said report co-author Randy Christensen, a staff lawyer at Ecojustice.
“The feedback we get out of places like the Okanagan is they don’t feel they’re in that different of a situation to California,” Christensen said.
B.C. can learn from Cailfornia, Brandes said, by making sure the new water regime has tough regulations, includes incentives to conserve water, and ensures water sources are not over-allocated.
Over-allocating water in decades leading to the current drought has been a problem in California, Brandes said, “because once people get used to getting a certain amount of water, they have a hard time giving it back.”
To avoid that future, B.C. should develop a better understanding of how much water is in the ground, how much is being taken by different users, and how much is needed for a healthy environment, he said.
In California, gathering that water data has proved a challenge, said Linda Sheehan, director of the Earth Law Center in Fremont, Calif.
“We just don’t have that data in California to make the good decisions we need to make. Because there’s always been this pushback on gathering the information — people are concerned that with the information, they might lose their water. But the problem is, we’re losing our water anyway,” she said.
“It’s like a bank account: You keep spending it, and it keeps going down, and you choose not to look at your statements. You have to look at the statements and figure out how much money you have, how much is coming in, and going out. Same thing with water.”
It wasn’t long ago, Sheehan said, that most Californians believed water resources were abundant, and didn’t worry about the remote seeming possibility of drought.
Dr. Hans Schreier, a UBC watershed management instructor, thinks the California comparison is legitimate and should be of concern to B.C. He supports the province’s efforts to update water laws, but criticized the Water Sustainability Act, saying it “doesn’t solve the problem, it just postpones the inevitable.”
B.C. should have precautionary measures in place now, Schreier said, “so that if it happens, we are prepared to deal with it. Right now, we are totally unprepared to deal with drought.”
Brandes said his report is not meant to represent “doom and gloom,” but instead an opportunity to get things right as B.C. updates century-old water laws.
“In some ways, California and B.C. are apples and oranges, but not as much as we think,” he said. “We’re actually in a similar place, just in a different time.”