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Thinking Beyond seeks to inspire and facilitate action. It is a practical resource designed for community leaders, water managers and policy makers seeking to make the case for a comprehensive and long-term appraoch to water demand management. By illustrating the potential of this approach, it urges communites to take water security to the next step–to think beyond the pipes and pumps and embrace new ways of managing water that offer opportunities for big savings, of both water and money.

In last year’s Water Conservation Plan, the City of Williams Lake committed itself to following a three-step program for water conservation.

The Capital Regional District (CRD), in partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands and the Peninsula Agricultural Commission, initiated the “Agricultural Water Use and Conservation Study” to gather, analyze, and present data on farm water use and conservation practices across the CRD. The resulting information will be used to set water rates for the agricultural sector, and to help the CRD develop water conservation program.

The Agriculture & Water community-of-interest is the web-delivery vehicle for informing British Columbians of agriculture and water issues in the Province.

This article provides a brief overview of ocean desalination, including a discussion of global and domestic trends, a comparison of technologies, a summary of the economics, and an overview of implementation considerations.

It has been suggested recently that water and sewage utilities move to “full-cost” accounting as a means of addressing some of the challenges facing them. However, there are disagreements regarding how to implement this concept, and few estimates exist that show the impact of such a change.

In this paper, the Canadian experience with water reuse and recycling is reviewed under five theme areas: technology; policy and regulation; research; public acceptance; and coordination. At present, water reuse and recycling in Canada is practiced on a relatively small scale and varies regionally depending on the availability of water supplies and regulatory flexibility.

Even in “water-rich” Canada, many jurisdictions are having trouble providing adequate, clean fresh water as their populations not only grow, but also exhibit higher expectations for water availability and water safety. The conventional approach to such problems accepted the history of constantly growing demand for water and responded by extending pipelines, constructing more dams and drilling deeper.

During the next quarter century, water utilities in North America will face a number of developments that will put pressure on their resources, spur them to develop alternative supplies, and necessitate new approaches to how they conduct business. This article in the August edition of the AWWA “Journal”, the second in a series, highlights two of these trends—population growth and climate change.

The Irrigation Industry Association of British Columbia (IIABC) has created an online Landscape Irrigation Scheduling Calculator to help irrigators develop water-efficient irrigation schedules. By entering basic information about climate, landscape types, soil conditions, crop root depth, and irrigation system type and spacing, irrigators can determine the optimum number of days to water, the irrigation run time for each day, and the maximum run time per cycle.