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The agenda for the half-day forum was structured in four parts. “The forum program was a mix of storytelling, showcasing, sharing and teaching so that we would achieve the learning outcomes,” reports Ted van der Gulik. “Our objective in the first two segments was to engage and energize our audience. For this reason, we conducted them as town-hall sharing in order to prime everyone for the teachable moment in segment #3. The teachable moment came when Jim Dumont showed that Washington State and California are on the same technical path as British Columbia.”

“We are experiencing wetter, warmer winters and longer, drier summers. BC dodged a bullet during the 2015 drought – that leads us to focus on how the decisions by those in local government make on a daily basis impact on the water balance. This perspective frames the bigger picture and sets the stage for drilling down into the details of the Water Balance Methodology,” stated Kim Stephens. “The takeaway for the forum is this phrase: watersheds are infrastructure assets. We are dealing with an integrated system. And water balance pathways are assets that provide water balance services.”

This famous Winston Churchill quotable quote is a relevant historical analogy for implementing a water balance approach to restore a desired watershed condition. At the forum, the quote provided a way to change the pace, capture audience attention and set the stage for the balance of the ‘look back to look ahead’ theme that characterized the storytelling in the opening segment of the forum. If there is a living memory of the way things were, then it should be possible to implement standards of practice that would replicate and restore a desired watershed condition.

“Getting to this point has involved the re-thinking of traditional approaches to urban hydrology and computer modelling,” wrote Tom Debo, a former colleague and friend of Ray Linsley. “Drainage engineers have traditionally thought in terms of flow rates, not volumes. In dealing with urban hydrology, we need to focus on how much rainfall volume has fallen, how we are going to capture it, and what we are going to do with it.” To learn more, watch the YouTube video of Kim Stephens providing CONTEXT, INTENT and RESULTS for the Water Balance Express.

“The Water Balance Methodology is based upon watershed and stream function and operation. Understanding how precipitation makes its way to the stream allow us to assess how a watershed and stream operates. The methodology provides a logical and straightforward way to assess potential watershed impacts resulting from urban development and analytically demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods proposed for preventing and/or mitigating those impacts in the stream using flow duration,” stated Jim Dumont.

“Water Balance adaptive action is necessary because we may be crossing an invisible threshold into a different hydro-meteorological regime in Western North America. Annual volumes of water entering and exiting our regions are not necessarily changing; instead, what is changing is how and when water arrives – it is feast AND famine. The ‘new normal’ in British Columbia is floods and droughts,” stated Kim Stephens. “Three landmark provincial initiatives are game-changers in terms of responding to the new reality because they enable action by local government.”

“The drought that extended this past winter, spring and summer from Vancouver Island to Manitoba and from Mexico to the Yukon suggests we may be crossing an invisible threshold into a different hydro-meteorological regime in Western North America. Our current risk assessments with respect to climate disruption are built on confidence in relative hydrologic stability that no longer exists. This changes everything. We had no idea until recently of how much influence the hydrological cycle has on our day to day lives or on the broader conditions that define the distribution and diversity of life on this planet,” stated Bob Sandford.

“The ‘design with nature’ guiding philosophy had its genesis more than two decades ago. Released circa 1993, the Stream Stewardship Guide for Planners and Developers document was an early, and in some respects the first, local government focussed design with nature guide. Looking back over the past 20-plus years, if the Stewardship Series was the first wave, the work of UBC’s James Taylor Chair on Sustainable Urban Landscapes was the second, and the Water Balance Approach is the third. Each of these ‘waves’ was initiated by different ‘groups’, but over time they merged from one to the other,” stated Erik Karlsen.

The volume-based approach that is being implemented in British Columbia picks up the baton that Dr. Ray Linsley started more than a generation ago. He pioneered the development of continuous hydrologic simulation as the foundation for water balance management. He was a true giant of the profession. “In the 1960s, Linsley championed the paradigm-shift from empirical relationships to computer simulation of hydrologic processes. He had little or no use for ‘simple hydrology’ and the many simple equations that were used to represent the hydrologic cycle,” stated Tom Debo, a colleague and friend.

“Establishing performance targets provides a quantifiable way of measuring success in protecting or restoring a watershed, and for identifying what needs to be done to achieve a certain level of protection. The litmus test for an acceptable Watershed Target is that the resulting RAINwater management solutions make sense, are affordable and result in net environmental benefits at a watershed scale. For a performance target to be implemented and effective, it must have feedback loops,” stated Ted van der Gulik.