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“PWSBC success is accomplished by partnering with the provincial government, local governments, non-profit societies and practitioners. Our successes are only possible with their support and efforts,” stated Ted van der Gulik. “The Partnership is responsible for three provincial tools that support ongoing implementation of the Water Sustainability Act. The three are the Agriculture Water Licencing Tool, Landscape Water Calculator, and Agriculture Water Demand Model.

“The Partnership finished a five year agreement with the Ministry of Agriculture to deliver the Agriculture Water Demand Model program in March of 2018. In May of 2018 another five year agreement was established in an effort to make the AWDM operational for the entire province. The new agreement will allow for additional work on digitizing soils data, update climate data to 2018 and develop an online version of the AWDM,” reported Ted van der Gulik.

“Because groundwater licencing is a requirement under the Water Sustainability Act, the Province looked to the Partnership to develop an agriculture water licencing tool,” wrote Ted van der Gulik. “The tool went live on February 29th and is now being used by those applying for a water licence as well as the water licence adjudicators. Additions that have been added to the tool include groundwater and watershed boundaries.”

“The Province passed the new Water Sustainability Act in 2014 and is currently working on implementation. Groundwater will be one of the first initiatives being tackled by the province. While conducting outreach on groundwater with agricultural producers, the Province was requested by the agricultural community to develop a tool that producers could use to determine how much water they should be applying for in an irrigation license. This created a partnership opportunity for PWSBC to make a material difference,” stated Ted van der Gulik.

“The Partnership will continue to implement the Water Sustainability Action Plan for British Columbia in 2015; and will look for new opportunities and activities that can help us celebrate our successes. Success can only be accomplished through the integration of efforts of practitioners, including our many partners in the provincial government, local governments and non-profit societies,” stated Ted van der Gulik. “An initiative of the Partnership in the coming years is to integrate young, energetic professionals with a vision towards water sustainability.”

“Major breakthroughs happen when decision-makers in government work with grass-roots visionaries in the community to create the future desired by all. Collaboration grows from a shared vision about the future and commitment to action: Collectively this is what we want to incrementally achieve and, over time, this is how we will work together to get there. This is the ‘top down and bottom up’ approach. It is about turning the whole game around to ‘design with nature’ as a consistent approach to development and redevelopment,” stated Tim Pringle.

Designing with nature is efficient. It amounts to using income from natural capital rather than drawing down the resource. Convening for Action on Vancouver Island (CAVI), an initiative of the Partnership, asserts that human settlement should be in relative balance with the ecology that supports it. This condition is prerequisite for designing with nature and it supports better control of the life-cycle costs of providing infrastructure for the built environment,” stated Tim Pringle.