Water-Centric Planning

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Ted van der Gulik

    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “We would have to increase irrigated land area by 50% to attain food security in British Columbia. The Fraser Valley alone could provide 2/3 of the area needed!” stated Ted van der Gulik, President of the Partnership for Water Sustainability in BC


    “The 50th anniversary of the ALR is an opportunity for reflection followed by action. The ALR saved the land. Without it, there would be no prospect for food security. Will today’s decision makers rise to the moment and secure the water supply necessary to irrigate the land needed for food security? The Agriculture Water Demand Model is a foundation piece for food security. The model utilizes detailed land use inventories and incorporates a 500 m gridded climate data set – the only one in North America. The model quantifies what we have versus what we need with respect to land and water,” stated Ted van der Gulik.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “The Watershed Security Strategy is the obvious mechanism to revisit, understand, learn from, and leverage past successes in the building blocks continuum. We have tools to help do the job,” stated Ted van der Gulik, President of the Partnership for Water Sustainability in British Columbia


    “A Partnership strength is the real-world experience we bring because of our multiple initiatives under Living Water Smart Actions. Under that vision, various building blocks processes have evolved over the decades. Living Water Smart successes are defined by collaboration and a “top-down and bottom-up” approach. This brings together decision-makers and community advocates. Successes are milestones along a building blocks continuum. We can achieve better stewardship of BC’s water resources for present and future generations,” stated Ted van der Gulik.

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    GROUNDWATER LICENSING IN BRITISH COLUMBIA IS A CRISIS IN THE MAKING: “But no amount of localized planning for healthy, more resilient watersheds will be credible if we don’t have a firm handle on who is using our shared water resources and how much they are using. And that assessment absolutely has to include licensed groundwater users who are in compliance,” stated Donna Forsyth, former legislative adviser in B.C.’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, in an article for The Tyee (February 2022)


    “What will the government do, come March 1, 2022? Enforce a law that it passed with broad support from both the governing party and opposition, and effectively shut businesses down by turning off their taps? Or will it turn a blind eye and allow thousands of business owners to use their water illegally, while their counterparts who did the right thing and applied for their licences follow the law? Either outcome guarantees trouble ahead and must be avoided. But before saying what needs to be done, we need to understand why we are in this mess,” stated Donna Forsyth.

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    WATER RESOURCE USE AND CONSERVATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Over the past several years, the B.C. government dropped the ball on several important and varied water-related files with the result that threats to public health and safety, critical infrastructure and food security have all increased,” stated Donna Forsyth, lead author for an opinion piece published by the Vancouver Sun newspaper (January 2022)


    “Mandates to facilitate development conflict with the protection of our water. This must change and it will require strong political leadership and the creation of a dedicated, independent and comprehensive water agency with a clear mandate to ensure the protection of our water resources as a top government priority. Last year’s floods and heat domes are a wake-up call. We can expect more and failure to make water policy changes now guarantees a torrent of trouble ahead,” stated Donna Forsyth.

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    FACT SHEETS FOR AGRICULTURAL WATER USE: “All reservoirs, whether natural or constructed, that take water from a stream to fill the facility will need a storage licence. The subsequent water use purpose, irrigation, also requires a water licence,” stated Stephanie Tam, Water Management Engineer with the BC Ministry of Agriculture (January 2022)


    Farmers in British Columbia often need storage facilities to supply farmstead water or to support water licences from surface or groundwater sources that do not provide sufficient flow during summer months. Water storages can be on either private or crown land, but a licence will be required to store water that is vested to the Province. Storages can be in the form of dugouts, reservoirs with small berms, or large reservoirs behind a dam. The rules and regulations that must be followed will depend on the type of storage facility being built.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “More hard surfaces in the uplands means more surface runoff volume is discharging into the agricultural lowlands. And the increased flows in streams are over longer durations. This is the real issue,” stated Ted van der Gulik, former Senior Engineer in the Ministry of Agriculture, when he explained the ARDSA criteria that have defined design practice for a half-century


    “In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, ARDSA was a Federal and Provincial capital program that funded rural irrigation water supply, rural drainage infrastructure as well as rural electrification projects. The rules were quite strict. Projects were required to have a return on the investment greater than 1. In other words, the value of the increase in agriculture production due to project implementation had to return more than the original cost of the project over a 20-year time frame, in net present value dollars at the time of project approval,” stated Ted van der Gulik.

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    LIVING WATER SMART IN BRITISH COLUMBIA: “Research by Jane Wei-Skillern offers insights into how champions in the local government and stream stewardship sectors can ensure that their collaborative efforts can have an impact that is dramatically greater than the sum of the individual parts,” stated Kim Stephens, Executive Director, Partnership for Water Sustainability in British Columbia (November 2021)


    “At the beginning of 2021, the Partnership leadership reflected on our long-term commitment to collaborative leadership and growing a network. From the outset, we had vowed never to fall into the trap of concentrating our energies on building an organization and thus losing sight of ‘the mission’. This view of the world reflected our history as a roundtable,” stated Kim Stephens. “Are there other precedents for our approach, we wondered? Or are we unique? We decided it was time to research the social science literature to definitively answer these and other questions.”

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    THE ERA OF WEATHER EXTREMES IS UPON US: “Basically, all of your biggest storms in terms of big damage, like we just saw, in the West Coast [U.S.] states, including British Columbia, are from atmospheric river storms,” said Marty Ralph, a researcher and director at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography (November 2021)


    According to Marty Ralph, despite being relatively small compared to the rest of the atmosphere, these rivers in the sky can carry up to 95 per cent of the water vapour that travels around the Earth’s surface, and can bring anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent of a given region’s yearly water supply.The warmer the air is, the more water vapour it can carry. As the atmosphere’s average temperature rises, then, an atmospheric river can grow — and when it makes landfall, it can release more rain or snow than in years past.

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    THE ERA OF WEATHER EXTREMES IS UPON US: In a matter of days, extreme rain swamped rivers and farmland across southern B.C. and triggered mudslides that blocked every major highway connecting the Lower Mainland to the rest of the country (November 2021)


    “It has been one of the most severe natural disasters to strike British Columbia in a generation, even after a year that has brought crisis after crisis. The sheer scope of the damage has been difficult to comprehend. This is a timeline of the first week, from storm touchdown to early clean-up, of a disaster which has effects that will reverberate across the province for months to come,” wrote Rhianna Schmunk. “The storm broke dozens of all-time rainfall records, dumping nearly a month’s worth of rain on some communities over 48 hours.”

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    THE ERA OF WEATHER EXTREMES IS UPON US: “The issues related to emergency management and climate action cannot be downplayed or ignored,” said UBCM president Laurey-Anne Roodenburg, when commenting on the pattern of sudden, extreme weather events that is testing the resiliency of B.C.’s communities (November 17, 2021)


    “While investing in emergency preparedness along with climate action, mitigation and adaptation will be costly, doing so will be much more cost effective than having critical infrastructure systems fail as a result of extreme weather events. We welcome the commitment made by the province to work with UBCM to consider the recommendations identified in the Ensuring Local Government Financial Resiliency report, and are ready to get to work on steps necessary in order to ensure B.C. communities have the resources necessary for our changing climate,” stated Laurey-Anne Roodenburg.

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