BACKGROUNDER SERIES ON SUSTAINABLE WATERSHED SYSTEMS: Governments of Canada and British Columbia fund water balance tools and resources for climate adaptation action (September 2017)
Note to Reader:
Inter-governmental collaboration and funding enable the Partnership for Sustainability in British Columbia to collaborate with others to develop approaches, tools and resources; as well as provide teaching, training and mentoring. In September 2017, the Partnership announced that eleven (11) decision support tools are now accessible from the re-built and re-launched waterbalance.ca website.
Visit the rebuilt waterbalance.ca website to learn more about the 11 water balance tools and calculators
“The warming of the planet’s atmosphere is causing water to move more quickly and disruptively through the global water cycle. Flood, drought, fire, wind and cold – extreme events are becoming the norm. Instabilities in the water cycle are increasingly apparent,” stated Kim Stephens, Executive Director, Partnership for Water Sustainability in British Columbia.
“The situation calls for a whole-systems approach to managing the water balance distribution where people live.
“Comprehensive and coordinated use of the 11 decision support tools accessible from waterbalance.ca, would assist communities on their journeys to a water-resilient future.
“A new tool is the Water Balance Model Desktop. It provides an advanced problem-solving capability. Its appeal is that the process for applying it would help communities create a vision of the desired future water balance for a watershed, and the steps to achieve it.”
The Challenge
“Opportunities for land use and infrastructure servicing practitioners to make a difference are at the time of (re)development. To those individuals the Partnership says: share and learn from those who are leading change; design with nature; ‘get it right’ at the front-end of the project; build-in ‘water resilience’; create a lasting legacy,” concluded Kim Stephens.
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