From Demand Management to "Soft Path" Water Planning
For a century or more, managers in Canada have used “supply side” approaches to meet urban water needs. More population growth meant new sources of water, bigger water treatment plants, more miles of water mains, and bigger sewage treatment systems.
Since 2002, the Foundation has supported the POLIS Project on Ecological Governance - Water Sustainability Project, at the University of Victoria in its examination of the option of "demand-side" management. Using tools such as conservation pricing, water efficient technologies and public education, demand-side management allows human needs to be met using less water.
POLIS has just completed its 5th major report, Thinking Beyond Pipes and Pumps: Top 10 Ways Communities Can Save Water and Money (October 2006). Based on three years of research, this practical resource urges community leaders, water managers and policy makers across Canada to look to water conservation and efficiency as the basis for a new urban water infrastructure. Thinking Beyond describes this new infrastructure,
including decentralized technologies and local programs directed
at changing behaviour, and demonstrates the practical ways a community
can to create a sustainable future. |
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The POLIS Project launched its research with two reports to diagnose the problems associated with conventional supply-side water management (Flushing the Future and What the Experts Think, both released in 2003). A third report issued in 2004, The Future in Every Drop, provided the prescription - practical action
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plans that would allow governments
at all levels to implement demand management for water in Canadian
cities.
In 2005 POLIS released At A Watershed - this report goes even further to examine sustainable water management in the broader context of governance. To embed conservation as a foundational tool for water managers, this report urges senior governments to promote and facilitate the implementation of "watershed governance" at the local level. |
The report argues that four key concepts should guide water planning and management:
- prevention and precaution;
- ecosystem-based management;
- matching authority to jurisdictions; and
- adaptive management.
These reports can be found at www.waterdsm.org/.
Recently, POLIS teamed up with Friends of the Earth Canada to produce, The Soft Path for Water in a Nutshell. This handbook, released in 2005 is an easy-to-read guide to "soft path" planning, a radically different way of planning for fresh water use and management. This type of planning challenges our patterns of freshwater consumption - Do we really need to use potable water to sprinkle our gardens? - and makes ecological sustainability a fundamental criterion in the planning process. |
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It is a guide to the work of a major research project led by Friends of the Earth Canada to develop and implement the "soft path" for water planning in Canada. With 2 years of dedicated support from the Foundation, FoE Canada has been leading the development of the methodology with a team of academics based at the Universities of Victoria, Waterloo and Acadia. They are working on applying the soft path at municipal, provincial and regional scales (respectively). This research is expected to be completed in winter of 2006/07 and will be published in a special September issue of Alternatives magazine.
The Soft Path in a Nutshell report and other information are available at: www.foecanada.org/