Public must help manage water supply
No one can be certain what the future holds except that it’s full of uncertainty. However, some probabilities do seem increasingly probable. Among the most obvious, as this summer’s drought suggested, are the extensive impacts of climate change coupled with the effects of regionally concentrated population growth. Together they produce wildfires racing through a tinder-dry urbanrural interface; disrupted harvest cycles; fishing streams closed to anglers; and restrictions on domestic water use. It tests our notions of sustainability in Metro Vancouver and British Columbia at large. One thing does seem certain — we’re beginning to comprehend that water isn’t a limitless resource.
Nowhere is this more evident, as The Vancouver Sun’s just-completed special report on provincial water resources indicates, than in a relationship to hydrological cycles that most of us have tended to take for granted. Water is the foundation of energy, agriculture, forestry, mining, transportation, tourism, recreation and service sectors that collectively contributed more than $2 trillion to B.C.’s cumulative GDP between 2004 and 2014.
Defenders of B.C.’s resource industries frequently argue — quite rightly — that our hospitals, schools and community well-being rely on their activities. Yet from pulp mills to mines, hydroelectric generation to sport fishing, all these activities rely on clean, reliable water to sustain industrial processes and the human populations that operate them. And, as our news team reports from every corner of B.C., it’s a relationship that’s far less certain than is frequently assumed.
Many British Columbians recognize the need to mediate and manage the competing claims on water resources that looming climate and population change will impose. As reporters Peter O’Neil in Ottawa and Rob Shaw in Victoria pointed out, policy-makers are already grappling with the issue in regulatory and legislative terms. B.C.’s new Water Sustainability Act dramatically extends the province’s regulatory authority from surface water to groundwater. It recognizes that loopholes which permitted the unlimited tapping of aquifers must be closed. And municipal authorities are already planning to meet increased demand in the face of possible water shortfalls. Meanwhile, far-sighted regional governments experiment with collaborative, consensus-based management models that involve multiple stakeholders.
Critics, on the other hand, say much more needs to be done in developing water-harvesting and storage frameworks for urban landscapes. They argue for better educating the public on limits to the resource and conservation. They warn creating effective long-term funding models is essential for municipal water infrastructure. They call for reconfiguration of drainage systems that now treat seasonal surpluses from precipitation as waste rather than as a valuable resource. And they advocate pricing models that reward efficiency and penalize profligacy — for example, universal metering and consumption-based charges. Others complain provincial water law is burdened by an inefficient topdown regulatory approach when, as in California’s bottom-up system, decision-making should be delegated to the communities most affected.
This is a big subject with big implications. Prudence recommends a robust public discussion of priorities and possibilities in the future management of our most essential resource. Water is far too important a matter to be defaulted to backroom policy wonks. Every citizen has a stake. Every citizen should insist on joining the conversation.