Canada not immune to water issues

Will Chabun in the Star Phoenix via the Regina Leader-Post (Canada): When Howard Wheater and his wife were moving last September to Saskatoon, where he would take up a high-profile position as the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, he picked up a copy of the New York Times in an airport.

If ever there was evidence of the importance of water to our planet, there it was in one issue: Stories on Russia's heat wave, Pakistan's epic floods (which displaced 20 million people and were described as the worst natural disaster in that country's history) and the climatological link between the two.

…In a wide-ranging speech Friday to a regional meeting of the Canadian Water Resources Association in Regina, Wheater said Canadians should not think they are immune to water issues, as shown by problems with water quality in rural areas and First Nations -and mounting unease about floods this spring.

Wheater said "we can't say" with certainty climate change was directly responsible for heavy rain and flooding on the Prairies last summer, but it is clear extreme weather is something we "are likely to see more -and then less."

Looking at water on the Canadian Prairies, he noted the heavy demands on the South Saskatchewan River system for irrigation in Alberta, human consumption in Saskatchewan and power generation in Manitoba.

Complicating things is the dependence of this river basin on runoff from glaciers in the mountains of Alberta, which clearly are shrinking. "It would take a multiyear drought to bring that to the top of the political and public agenda," said Wheater, who added another complicating factor is that models for forecasting climate and water use are based on existing data and past trends, while the future is unpredictable…

The North Saskatchewan River, shot by Marcel Schoenhardt, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license