Water-use policies draining B.C. dry, watchdog warns

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/water-use-policies-draining-bc-dry-watchdog-warns/article1298034/

With snow packs diminishing because of climate change and population growing, British Columbia is headed for a water crisis unless better management practices are brought in soon, cautions a new report.

The Pacific Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, an independent advisory body set up by the federal government, says B.C. has already faced critically low water flows in several areas that foreshadow future problems.

During a long, hot summer in 2003, the town of Summerland in the Okanagan Valley was required to release stored water into Trout Creek and to restrict water use by farmers to maintain survival flows for fish. That summer also saw a pulp mill fighting with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans over water allocations when the flow of the Cowichan River on Vancouver Island fell to a critically low level, threatening spawning salmon. And in the summer of 2006, the town of Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, was forced to close businesses for several days because of a shortage of drinking water.

The PFRCC report says those incidents "provide telling evidence that human and ecosystem demands for freshwater are in conflict today and will become increasingly so in the future."

The report points out that global climate models predict an increase of winter temperatures of up to four degrees by 2050, and a summer decrease in precipitation of 20 per cent in the Okanagan Basin by the same year.

Meanwhile, a 50-per-cent reduction in snow pack and a 60-per-cent increase in December runoff is predicted for the Georgia Basin, which includes the densely populated Lower Mainland.

Such changes make it more difficult to balance human and environmental needs for water, the report states, "because it is no longer valid to assume that past observations of the timing and availability of freshwater will hold into the future."

The document calls on the government of B.C. to revise provincial water management to "recognize in-stream rights," creating a legal requirement to consider the needs of fish and other wildlife when licensing water rights. It also says surface and groundwater should be managed jointly, rather than in isolation.

Mark Angelo, deputy chair of the PFRCC, said it is urgent that B.C. reform its water licensing system now, rather than waiting for conflicts to grow worse.

"B.C.'s Water Act dates back to 1909," Mr. Angelo said. "It's in serious need of revision. It's not environmentally sustainable."

He said under current regulations it's possible to license away all the water in a system - in effect, to run streams dry - when there should be a mechanism to protect in-stream flows and cap water-rights allocations.

"Fish often pay the price when too much water is allocated for use," Mr. Angelo said.

He said on the Salmon River in Langley he has watched over the past 20 years while water levels in an adjacent aquifer have dropped so much that the upper river runs dry in the summer.

"If that continues, the drying up could extend to the productive middle section of the river and that would be catastrophic for salmon," he said. "We have to be smarter about how we manage our water. This is a moral issue."