Josh Brandon in the Winnipeg Free Press: The flood season of 2011 is among the worst Manitoba has ever seen. Many residents are now demanding permanent solutions to our chronic flood problems. Provincial and municipal flood officials are pouring tremendous resources into moving more water through our valleys, but the laws of physics limit the speed at which water will move across the prairie landscape. Long-term solutions to our flood woes require looking upstream.Two environmental factors are major influences: global climate change and loss of wetlands. Until we address these problems, flooding in Manitoba is likely to worsen. We have had a string of wet years in which records have been broken across the Red River basin. The flood of 1997 was seen as a one-in-100-year event, but levels approaching or exceeding those levels were seen in 2009 and again this year on parts of the river. Now records are being surpassed on the Assiniboine also. It seems the normal flood cycle is changing.
The loss of wetlands is a significant contributor. Manitoba is home to more than 22 million hectares of wetlands, an area larger than Great Britain. Unfortunately, up to 70 per cent of wetlands have been lost or degraded in some parts of the province. Despite the introduction of restoration and conservation programs in recent years, wetlands loss continues. Every year, 2,000 hectares of wetlands are lost in southwestern Manitoba alone.
Farmers' desire to drain their lands is understandable. It is easier to drive a tractor through a wetland than around it. Wetlands not only represent lost potential crop area, but tax regimes often penalize farmers who choose not to plant wetlands. Meanwhile, population growth and urban sprawl have put pressure on wetlands to be drained for residential development….
The Red River flooding in Winnipeg, shot by Shahnoor Habib Munmun, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license
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