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“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.

Andy Reese coined the term Voodoo Hydrology in 2006 to describe the misapplication of science that characterizes stormwater management practice. “Perhaps, if we make enough estimates of enough factors, the errors in estimation, high and low, will average out to the right answer. This is where voodoo really comes in handy. The good news is that, as Dr. Tom Debo says, ‘Who can prove you are wrong?’ Well, the Omniscient Being can, but is probably busy elsewhere,” says Andy Reese.