Water-Centric Planning

“The partnership umbrella provided by the Water Sustainability Action Plan has allowed the Province to leverage partnerships to greatly enhance the profile and resulting impact of Living Water Smart. In effect, the Action Plan partners are functioning as the on-the-ground Living Water Smart implementation arm with local government, allowing my team to focus on legislative reform. Living Water Smart comprises 45 commitments grouped into five themes. The Action Plan has played a key delivery role in two of the five,” stated Lynn Kriwoken.

Published in March 2002 by the Greater Vancouver Regional District, the “Watershed / Landscape-Based Approach to Community Planning” was developed by an interdisciplinary working group and is the genesis of “water-centric planning”. “An important message is that planning and implementation involves cooperation among all orders of government as well as the non-government and private sectors,” stated Erik Karlsen.

“Originally, this COI was to be called Watershed-Based Planning for consistency with the community planning element of the Water Sustainability Action Plan. However, federal and provincial funding enabled us to broaden the scope of the COI to encompass a spectrum of perspectives, ranging from provincial watershed planning to local government community planning. This expanded scope is an ambitious undertaking. We are excited by the challenges that integration of perspectives involves,” stated Robyn Wark.

Neil Goeller created the vision for a community flow monitoring network that teaches and coaches stream stewards across B.C. to measure streamflow and close a data gap in community planning. With the energy generated by the Parksville 2019 Symposium, he successfully brought the idea to fruition as a provincial program in 2022. “Parksville 2019 raised awareness and encouraged volunteers to get involved. It is a word-of-mouth process to expand participation in the initiative. I see this as a slow and steady, organic process to grow the collaboration,” stated Neil Goeller.

“The Vancouver Island Community Flow Monitoring Network supports groups who are interested in monitoring flows along the east coast of Vancouver Island. For the most part these are volunteer-led, community stewardship groups. The groups operate the stations. We provide training, do site visits for as long as needed until they feel comfortable doing it on their own. They just need a bit of help. That is where we come in with tools, resources and training to break down barriers. Our goal is to get high quality data for publication in the provincial database,” stated Ally Badger.

Content posted on waterbucket.ca helps others achieve their goals. Blue Ecology is a prime example. Stories on the Blue Ecology page on waterbucket.ca have magnified the awareness of Michael Blackstock’s work globally. After watching him in the Partnership for Water Sustainability’s Blue Ecology video, Dr. Serpil Oppermann at Cappadocia University in Turkey was overjoyed when she contacted Michael Blackstock and he accepted her invitation to contribute a chapter to the “Bloomsbury Handbook to the Blue Humanities” book that she is co-editing.

Erik Karlsen had a remarkable impact on the shape of BC communities. He was always where the action was – where creative and innovative energies were flowing. His ability to gravitate to that action – and to ‘morph’ into whatever current political form it was taking – was a real feature of Erik’s career. He had a job description like any other employee in the public service, but no supervisor, Assistant Deputy Minister or Deputy Minister, ever had the slightest idea what Erik actually did with his time. His trademark was that he got good things done.

“”In the 1990’s, water management in BC lagged decades behind other Canadian jurisdictions. Lynn Kriwoken saw a future of recurring drought, conflicts and urgent need for strong water legislation for BC. With single-mindedness, she articulated her vision to successive governments (NDP and Liberal) and convinced them to take legislative action. Amazingly, Lynn led these and other legislative reforms over a very short and politically unstable period of two decades, a testament to her ability to work effectively across bi-partisan lines,” stated Mike Wei.

Lynn Kriwoken is a former Executive Director in the BC Ministry of Environment. In government, Lynn was a leader who made a difference behind the scenes with her vision and ability to make things happen. She was the Living Water Smart champion, and her passion and leadership drove it. “We took a different approach with British Columbia’s Water Plan. Rather than a boring, bureaucratic plan that starts with a vision, mission, goals, actions and words and more words…we started with a design. It was a different approach for government,” stated Lynn Kriwoken.

Mike Tanner is the waterbucket.ca visionary. His leadership got the website off the ground and online within 12 months of the inaugural meeting of founding partners in 2004. He did the heavy lifting that brought together provincial ministries and so many others for a common purpose. “Somebody had to put up the initial seed funding to build support for the waterbucket.ca idea. And that is what I was able to bring from BC Hydro with a $5000 contribution from the Power Smart program. Champions within other agencies quickly jumped on board and we were on our way,” stated Mike Tanner.

“Urban streams are rarely managed as ecological systems or as municipal assets. Rather, they are sliced and diced to suit land development objectives. And this has consequences. If land use intensity increases to levels that destroy the conditions of the stream, then there will be no stream asset to produce ecological services. Communities need annual budgets to tackle Riparian Deficits along streams. EAP, the Ecological Accounting Process, gives them that number,” stated Tim Pringle.

“The region’s continued health and sustainability demands that we treat it as one system, not as a composite of separate and jurisdictionally distinct entities. As Parliamentary Secretary for the Georgia Basin Initiative, I had a visionary document and strong personal support from Minister Marzari at the top. And I had Erik Karlsen’s on-the-ground connections with Basin communities and their issues. All I had to do was run with it, And that’s what we did!. The Georgia Basin Initiative was successful because we had the right people at the right time,” stated Joan Sawicki.

“Climate change has aggravated an existing vulnerability related to seasonal supply of water in British Columbia. Over time, and as the population has grown, the safety factor has been shrinking. While it rains a lot, we do not have an abundance of supply when demand is greatest. In 2015, Western North America clearly crossed an invisible threshold into a different hydrometeorological regime. Low snowpack and lingering impacts from on-going drought in recent years are pointing towards elevated drought hazards for this upcoming spring and summer,” stated Kim Stephens.