Water Policy in Alberta
Like many other parts of Canada, Alberta is blessed with plentiful fresh water resources and challenged by the increasing stress on those resources from urban, agricultural and industrial use. The Foundation is engaged in a number of projects that focus on water policy in the province.
Researchers at the Pembina Institute for Appropriate Development have been examining the impacts of Alberta's oil industry on its water resources, with an eye to identifying how water use can be reduced and what policies could reduce water use and the impacts on water supplies. The result of this work, released in May 2006 as Troubled Waters, Troubling Trends, paints a stark picture of the high (and rapidly rising) demand for water in the oil sands industry. Because of the pressure to expand oil production, the report concludes that "in some parts of the province, Alberta will soon have to decide which is more important: water or oil".
The report is available at www.pembina.org/pubs/.
The province of Alberta launched its provincial water strategy, Water for Life, in 2003. Central to the Water for Life initiative is the adoption of sustainable watershed management approaches. Canadian Institute of Resources Law (CIRL) at the University of Calgary has been conducting research related to the Water for Life initiative. This has focused on the impact on watershed management of old water taking licenses grandfathered under the Water Act and improving understanding of the provincial legal and policy framework for management of groundwater.
For more information and access to publications by CIRL, see www.ucalgary.ca/~cirl/.
In the Bow River Basin, Bow Riverkeeper
is also engaged in the Water for Life initiative and is focused
on the development and implementation of watershed management through
the Watershed Protection and Advisory Councils (WPACs). As the non-profit
representative on the Bow River WPAC and a member of the Alberta
Water Council's Water Conservation, Efficiency, and Productivity
Project Team, the group is working to ensure that:
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The Foundation also supported a recent partnership project between Waterlution and the UN Water for Life Decade Partnership in Canada. In this project, interested youth are invited to a series of three-day workshops designed to engage them in dialogue about current water issues in the Rocky Mountain region of Alberta and the innovative solutions that exist to address the issues. The goal of the project is to develop future leaders in water resource management and protection. The first workshop took place in June 2006 at the Castle Mountain Youth Hostel near Banff.
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The Foundation has also been supporting the work of David Schindler, Canada's foremost water researcher. The much-decorated scientist who won the Stockholm Water Prize in 1991 and Canada's Killam Prize for Science in 2003 has been studying the water regime in western Canada. His most recent work demonstrates that climate warming and human modifications to watersheds have already significantly reduced the flows of major rivers in the |