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    NEW REPORT > ‘Tapped Out’ Sounds Alarm about British Columbia’s Looming Water Crisis


    “Many people believe that B.C. has limitless water supplies. Unfortunately, this is simply not true. All over the province, communities are already experiencing water shortages, and low water levels in many rivers threaten the survival of salmon. I began this project about a year ago, and my mission was to find a way to demonstrate how B.C. does not have the abundant water that many people think it does. Unfortunately, BC has very poor information about how much water we have and how much we use,” stated Tanis Gower.

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    Planting 1 Billion Hectares of Forest Could Help Check Global Warming: “Action is urgent, and governments must now factor this into their national strategies to tackle climate change,” stated Dr. Jean-Francois Bastin, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (July 2019)


    The Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich investigates nature-based solutions to climate change. In their latest study the researchers showed for the first time where in the world new trees could grow and how much carbon they would store. Dr. Jean-Francois Bastin, also suggests that there is further potential to regrow trees in croplands and urban areas, highlighting the scope for agroforestry and city trees to play a significant role in tackling climate change.

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    ‘WATER RISK ATLAS’ IS AN INITIAL SCREENING TOOL: “We’re currently facing a global water crisis. We’re likely to see more ‘Day Zeros’ in the future,” said Betsy Otto, Global Water Director, World Resources Institute (August 2019)


    The world runs on water. Yet the world’s water systems face formidable threats. More than a billion people currently live in water-scarce regions, and as many as 3.5 billion could experience water scarcity by 2025. The Water Risk Atlas is a scale of “water stress” — how close a country comes to draining its annual water stores in a typical year. In areas of high or extremely high water stress, said Betsy Otto, “if you then hit a drought … you’re really in trouble, because you’re already using most of what you have.”

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    EARTH’S FRESHWATER FUTURE: “When you think about changing the distribution of precipitation, then you start to think that if you’re getting more heavy precipitation, that might mean more flooding,” said NASA’s Christa Peters-Lidard


    “If we’re going to see more heavy rainfall events and we’re going to see them especially in areas that are not designed for those floods, that means that we need to think about how to adapt our infrastructure and rethink the way we’ve designed some of our bridges and drainage systems,” said Christa Peters-Lidard, Deputy Director for Hydrology, Biospheres, and Geophysics at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland. But while some areas are projected to get wetter, others will become much drier. Warming temperatures and changing precipitation patterns can lead to droughts.

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    CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN IMPACT: “There are three different types of flooding that can happen – rain, river and coastal,” says Dr. Tobias Börger, environmental economist, University of Stirling


    “Engineered solutions are quite expensive to maintain which means unless there is constant investment they won’t be as effective as they should be in stopping floods,” stated Dr. Tobias Torborg. “However, there are also more natural, non-concrete options called blue and green infrastructure which focus on building vegetative river banks and wetlands – a system of plants and water – and more green areas to reduce flood risk and potential flood impact – because it means rainwater can enter the ground more easily.”

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    ADAPTING TO A CHANGING CLIMATE: “Green infrastructure is an essential component of managing risks to people and property from extreme weather events,” stated Jan Cassin, Water Initiative Director, Forest Trends Foundation (July 2019)


    “Globally, more sustainable land management through ‘natural climate solutions’ can deliver up to 37 percent of the mitigation needed to meet the Paris Agreement’s 2-degree target. Looking beyond their boundaries to achieve climate commitments can therefore simultaneously help cities achieve greater water security and forge more positive connections with their neighbors in rural communities,” wrote Jan Cassin. “Cities and their utilities should embrace natural asset management. “

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    LOOMING IMPACT OF HISTORIC EUROPE HEAT WAVE: “As a ‘blocking ridge’ sets up over Greenland, it could promote a widespread and significant melt event like the one in 2012. During that summer, nearly all of the ice sheet experienced melting,” stated Ruth Mottram, a researcher with the Danish Meteorological Institute


    “Assuming this comes off (and it seems likely) we would expect a very large melt event over the ice sheet,” Mottram said. “This was a very similar situation to 2012 where melt reached all the way up to Summit station. The Arctic sea ice is already at record low for the time of year so clearly we may be looking at a situation where both Arctic sea ice and Greenland ice sheet have record losses even over and above 2012 — though we won’t know for sure until after the event.”

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    COVERING CLIMATE NOW: “Can we tell the story so people get it,” stated Bill Moyers, legendary journalist and political commentator, at launch of major international media initiative


    Each of the media outlets involved in the initiative have committed to a week of concentrated coverage beginning on September 16, 2019 in the lead up to Climate Action Summit hosted by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in New York. The summit is an attempt to spur world leaders to develop new plans to reduce carbon emissions by 45 per cent over the next decade and reach a target of zero net emissions by 2050. All that’s required is for each outlet to make a good-faith effort to increase the amount and the visibility of its climate coverage.

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    Preliminary Strategic Climate Risk Assessment for British Columbia: “Only after wading into the executive summary did one realize it was one of the more alarming documents commissioned by this or any other B.C. government,” wrote Vaughan Palmer, Vancouver Sun columnist (July 2019)


    “At first glance the report posted quietly on the provincial government website this week resembled a typical midsummer offering. Pretty pictures on the cover. The word ‘preliminary’ in the title. Not even the courtesy of a media release to flag its arrival. All seemingly calculated to be overlooked in the July political doldrums,” wrote Vaughan Palmer. “More than 400 pages, the report evaluates the risks to B.C. over the next 30 years of 15 specific climate-change-driven events, each weighed on a sliding scale of consequences from ‘low’ to ‘catastrophic’.”

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    ENGLISHMAN RIVER ON VANCOUVER ISLAND: “The watershed is the base unit for the purposes of a forest company’s landscape level plan,” stated Domenico Iannidinardo, Vice-President of Mosaic Forest Management, when he explained the importance of hydrological balance in a panel session on ‘Watershed Health and You’ at the Parksville 2019 Symposium (watch on YouTube)


    “The watershed is the base unit of ecology, certainly on Vancouver Island,” stated Domenico Iannidinardo. “Over 80% of the Englishman River watershed is dedicated to forest management. Applying a landscape level approach makes a working forest work for multiple values. Hydrology and ecology values are managed through conservation agreements, land sales, and cooperation with researchers and communities. A guiding objective is to keep sediment out of streams.”

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