Melting Point

Those developments pale against dramatic trends in the Rocky Mountains, which have consequences as far east as Manitoba. The linkage involves the major rivers flowing out of the Rockies, which provide much of the water used by three provinces. The ultimate sources of most of these rivers are mountain glaciers and snowpack. Now both are disappearing as the cryosphere succumbs to global warming. Instead of the glaciers and snowpack acting as natural “dams” holding back water for summer use, rain fails to turn to snow, and floods quickly through the system. The result is less water as the summer progresses.

“Along the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rocky Mountains,” concludes Environment Canada’s Climate Change Impacts report, “glacier cover is now approaching the lowest experienced in the past 10,000 years.” Later freeze-ups, earlier springs, and milder winters all cut further into snow accumulation. “In the central interior we’ve got about five decades [of data] with about a 10-percent-per-decade decrease in snow depth,” says Mattison, BC’s comptroller of Water Rights. “The total snowpack is lower and lower.”

Some 70 million people in a dozen states and four provinces, and cities from Edmonton to Los Angeles, rely on rivers flowing from the snow-capped Rockies. To put that into perspective, California relies on water saved in snow and icefields for about half its annual requirements. Should even one-third of the snowpack vanish, the state would either need to build the equivalent of 300 more reservoirs or annually import roughly eight times the water contained in all of Alberta’s existing reservoirs.

The collapsing cryosphere is one reason why BC has the highest rate of climate change among the provinces. The other is a shift in rainfall patterns. “The province has some of the wettest (coastal mountains) and driest (southern interior) places in southern Canada,” the Meteorological Service notes, adding: “Virtually all Canadian records for precipitation have been set in BC.” During certain times, and in certain regions, there is too much water. In fact, total precipitation over the province has been increasing by 4 percent a decade for as long as the snowpack has been shrinking. “We may not have less water [overall] as a result of climate change,” contends Mattison. “We may have more.”

The same province gives a dramatic illustration of the dangers from evaporation as temperatures rise. Soil scientist Denise Neilsen studies how crops grown in the Okanagan, where in most years irrigated orchards and vineyards use every drop of water available to them, will respond to higher temperatures. Within the lifetime of Lorraine Bennest’s new orchard, Neilsen says, her Ambrosia apples and other valley crops will need to “transpire” at least 12 percent more water, leading to dramatic increases in demand. “As we move through the century, the crisis is going to occur more frequently,” Neilsen says. “I’m very worried for this valley.”

All three reports make it clear that Canada will have more rainfall in the future. But it may not count for much because we also stand to lose more as higher temperatures increase evaporation. Our problem, once again, is not supply but distribution. Some areas, like the heavily populated Great Lakes Basin, will face severe shortages, while parts of the Rockies will be awash in water. We are left with Kindy Gosal’s question: “What do we do about it?”

Earlier this year, an international climate change task force led by US Republican senator Olympia Snowe and former British Labour cabinet member Stephen Byers, gave humanity less than a decade to act before average temperatures rise more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. “Above [that] level,” it warned, “the risks of accelerated or runaway climate change increase. The possibilities include . . . the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the shutdown of thermohaline [convection] ocean circulation and with it, the Gulf Stream [which warms western Europe], and the transformation of the planet’s forests and soils from a net carbon sink to a net source of carbon.”

Canada’s response must address the implications of this new weather reality. But some of the options will shatter Canadian taboos about selling water to the US, building massive dams, and diverting major rivers. Even before then, increasing demand for water in border regions will almost certainly collide with climate change to “require adjustment of formal and informal criteria and legal instruments used for managing binational water resources,” as the authors of Threats put it. Translated: we’ll need to open our minds to new ways of sharing water and its management with the United States. Whichever strategy we choose, we do not have much time. Approving and building waterworks take decades; changing attitudes, especially if they involve assets steeped in symbolism, will take even longer. Whatever we want in place by 2025, we must begin to prepare within the next ten years.

The most immediate challenge is how to resolve intensifying competition for water. Conventional “soft path” thinking insists that when demand exceeds supply, aggressive conservation should bring the two back into line. But conservation has its limits. In southern Nevada, where authorities have spent tens of millions of dollars to encourage conservation and recycling, demand will soon outgrow supply. In Canada, where agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of water consumption, longer growing seasons may allow for double harvests, with a corresponding increase in demand for water. But will we say no to food in order to save water? We cannot simply conserve our way out of finding some equitable process for allocating this resource. “There are an increasing number of conflicts about how much water each person should have and what it should be used for,” says University of Lethbridge economist Dan LeRoy. “Which is a better way to handle those: through markets, or a central authority? There is no third way.”

Alberta is the first province to permit the buying and selling of water rights. But wary aqua-nationalists, fearing a rapacious America, have bitterly resisted wider consideration of commerce in water. Any transaction involving bulk water, they argue, even one conducted entirely within Canada, risks triggering trade commitments that would render Canada powerless to deny American demands for our water. “Floodgates will be opened and neither the provinces nor Ottawa can stop US diversions,” insists Council of Canadians water campaigner Sara Ehrhardt.