Water crisis looms on Prairie horizon

Margaret Munro
Edmonton Journal
Tuesday, April 04, 2006

Energy boom, climate warming a perilous combination

CREDIT: Bruce Edwards, The Journal, file
WATER CRISIS FORECAST FOR PRAIRIES: The Edmonton
region could be in for more droughts like the one that hit in
2000, above, warns a U of A expert, ...

Alberta may be swimming in oil, but a new study says the province is in grave danger of running out of water.

There is an "impending water crisis" on the western Prairies with "far-reaching" implications, says the study released Monday by the U.S. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It says Alberta, with its booming and thirsty economy, is most vulnerable.

Lead author David Schindler, a celebrated environmental scientist at the University of Alberta, says the province needs to put the brakes on the energy boom and population explosion until it figures out how to better manage and conserve its dwindling and critically important supply of water.

"We really need to pull out all the stops on water and watershed conservation," he said in an interview.

Schindler, who has long warned about looming water shortages, says even he was "shocked" by some of the findings of the study that charts how Prairie temperatures have been rising over the last century and water levels have been dropping.

"Worst affected is the South Saskatchewan River, where summer flows have been reduced by 84 per cent since the early 20th century," reports Schindler and co-author William Donahue of Freshwater Research Ltd. in Edmonton. Municipalities, industry and agriculture draw heavily from the river, which is fed by shrinking glaciers in the Rockies and flows through Alberta and into Saskatchewan.

While the drop in the South Saskatchewan is the most dramatic, records for other major rivers follow the same direction. Rivers such as the Peace and Oldman, which have been radically altered by dams, reservoirs and large-scale water extractions, have summer flows 40 to 60 per cent below historic values, the study says.

Summer flows in the lower reaches of the Athabasca River, which supplies water to the massive oilsands projects in northeastern Alberta, have dropped 30 per cent since 1970. The study says extracting oil from the tar sand consumes three to six barrels of water for every barrel of oil produced. If water use is not curtailed, Schindler and Donahue predict by 2020 the massive project could be consuming nearly half the low winter flow in the river that is critical to fish and the ecosystem of the Athabasca Delta World Heritage Site.

Schindler says there has been enough waste water generated by the oilsands project to fill Lake Erie.

"And it would be full of toxic water," says Schindler, who would like to see the multibillion-dollar project scaled back until engineers figure out how to recycle and reuse water.

"The thing I object to is that they are just plowing ahead with the technology that they have now because they can make such big profits."

The study says climate change has compounded the water woes and forecasts it will make things much worse in the future as the glaciers, which act like water towers for the Prairies, continue to recede and temperatures climb.

Schindler and Donahue examined temperature, precipitation, evaporation and river flow records from 11 sites, from Forth Smith in northern Alberta south to Regina.

Over the last century the sites have undergone, on average, a warming of one to four degrees Celsius, with much of the increase since 1970, they report. Almost half the sites receive 14 to 24 per cent less annual precipitation, and none of the sites has experienced an increase in precipitation.

The warm weather has accelerated the melting of glaciers that have fed the Prairie rivers for millennia. Large glaciers in the headwaters of the Bow, Saskatchewan and Athabasca rivers shrank about 25 per cent in the last century, and continue to melt away "rapidly," the study says.

The scientists conclude a water crisis is looming: "We predict that in the near future climate warming, via its effect on glaciers, snow packs and evaporation, will combine with cyclic drought and rapidly increasing human activity in the WPP (Western Prairie Provinces) to cause a crisis in water quantity and quality with far-reaching implications."

Schindler, an often outspoken and impassioned defender of ecosystems, is an acclaimed scientist whose work helped bring world attention to the acid rain caused by industrial pollution. He has received many awards for his research, including Canada's top prize the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering awarded by the federal government in 2001.

Schindler expects the study will generate "hate mail" from his critics, but says the Alberta government is taking steps in the right direction to try to conserve water. He says it has replaced "the old uneducated dinosaurs who had about the intelligence of a sack of hammers" with bright ministers who are trying to develop sustainable water policies. But he says much more needs to be done to protect watersheds and wetlands, and to conserve and better manage water.

He says he's hoping there are "enlightened" people in Stephen Harper's government who will push for curbs on growth, water conservation and cuts in greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.

"To stabilize climate, we need about a 50 per cent cut in emissions within 40 to 50 years," Schindler says. "And sooner rather than later."

© CanWest News Service 2006