Podcast:
https://gwfnet.net/fileserver/T-2024-01-16-m17bheTMc002d5Rm2q4jMZ9w/CanadasDryWereInANewGameHere.mp3Original link:
https://thebigstorypodcast.ca/2024/01/15/canadas-dry-were-in-a-new-game-here/Computer-generated transcript:
no doubt remember last year's forest fire season it would be impossible to forget but did you know that some of those fires which and your experience are months in the past right now they are smoldering underbrush and leaves hybernating is perhaps one way to put it they are just waiting for conditions to be warm enough and dry enough to spring back to life and i got some bad news a vast vast area of canada that is in great peril in play 24 for extreme hydrological drought something unprecedented in modern times there is not enough snow there is not enough water not enough of what we would consider a normal healthy winter and that means as you might imagine a bad fire season to come but not just a bad fire season it means farmers making tough decisions about which crops to save and witch 2 let die it means livestock calls and water restrictions it means for some communities already questions about what to do when the water runs out these are not questions we are used to asking in this country especially not in the middle of winter but they are questions we are going to be asking more winters than not from now on so canada's dry our world is changing here is what that means for all of us i'm jordan heath rawlings this is the big story john pomeroy is a professor in the department of geography and planning at the university of saskatchewan he is a canada research chair and water resources and climate change hi john hello thanks for finding some time for us today oh so pleasure to speak to you i wanted to begin because this is where it dawned on me how serious this was by asking you a better is oatmeat british columbia are you aware of what's been happening there yes yeah mcbride is really a almost a canary in the coal mine for the canadian rockies has been running out of water and they've been looking at alternative water supplies this is surprising for a canadian rockies community we think of the rockies as the water towers for western and northern canada and here we have a small town there that's running out and it's because the glaciers that once fed the creek that supply water to it have receded so much that there are no longer contributing streams fill in the summer and because of very low snow backs last year and early snowmelt and then extreme broke and all this came together and put mcbride in a terrible situation and it's i'm sure we'll see many other communities in that situation as time progresses if it's the canary in the coal mine like how normalized could it become that communities that we just simply assume would have a healthy is the amount of water are struggling yes fold cowgirl birthday head voluntary water restrictions last summer because the flows on the bow river were in the summer time and fall they lowest ever recorded and that's because of declining laser contributions to the bold river but also a low snow pack that melted about a month early and then fairly dry weather after that in extreme heat so that's what the late 21st century looks like and i'll be this year is very very worried and talking about mandatory water restrictions and alberta itself going to stage 5 drought as a highly lightly scenario for 2024 in the big picture then since we're talking about alberta and calgary and possibly the rest of the prairies what kinds of of dryness have we seen across canada as summer has turned into fall and winter yeah it's is rather interesting across canada the drought extends from british columbia to it's labrador and from the us border up into the northwest territories so its extensionve unprecedented and it's severity in parts of southern british columbia southern over in saskatchewan is also unprecedented it allows for the summer and fall and then moving into early winter we had the first part of winter without a snow pack at all which is exceedingly rare for the prairies for southern bc and for much of the rest of the central canada and that along with various soil moisture levels are reservoirs that have been depleted already and are some cases 5 m below normal levels groundwater that's been depleted it puts us in a precarious situation and now that i'm speaking in mid january the stopacks and british columbia are 1/2 of where they should be at this time of year and very similar conditions on the eastern slopes of the rockies and alberta these are the water towers that supply that the rivers have flown to bc the northwest territories alberta's dispatch from manitoba so as a vast vast area of canada that is in great peril in 2024 for extreme hydrological drought something unprecedented in modern times how do we quantify how dry a part of the country is what qualifies as a drought i'm trying to give our listeners a sense of i guess how much water is missing or how far away these places are from having a healthy balance yes we talk about different types of drunk there is a meteorological drought which will be lack of precipitation and sometimes in the season proved the access of heat which often accompanies drug and so that's been a very extreme over parts of western canada into the boreal forest but then when we talk about agriculture we're usually looking at soil moisture and that causes agricultural droughts and so fritz and some parts of the prairies who are moisture levels are less than 40% of where they should be at this time of year there's hydrological drought which is to flow in the major rivers the levels of late and things like that hydrological drought takes longer to form but it also takes longer to come out of and that has been record across bc alberta and saskatchewan this year in 2023 lake deep baker which supplies 70% of the scash wind with water received only 28% of a normal influence from alberta and that's due to the drought and the mountains and plains in alberta and the heavy irrigation there and then the wildfires which covered canada record amounts in many parts of the country were again caused by the drought so a drought in the northern forest turns into a wildfire season right so that route manifests itself differently depending on how we're looking at it and what the impacts are have these unprecedented levels of drought as you just put it been receiving enough attention in the media and otherwise considering the danger they might represent we've been looking at this drought like the blind man and the elephant in the indian legend we haven't talked about the wildfires or the poor harvest or the low flows of calgary or bc towns and villages with water restrictions but we haven't put it together that these are all manifestations of the same thing they're the hottest year in human history in 23 or the hottest years in canadian history and depending where you are in the country that year with temperatures of 38° in the northwest territories and then the early snow mel to the lack of rain this was a year that was not really a drought but it was a year that very closely followed the worst case climate projections for around the year 2100 so this gives us a taste of what climate change might bring to canada if we don't get greenhouse gas concentrations reduced very very quickly and so it's a wake up call as well but it also has challenged our water management systems across the country the low flow is crossing provincial boundaries and territorial boundaries the challenge is in managing alberta had to suspend water for a chairgation district for the first time ever at the end of the summer it is affects food security energy security manitoba hydro bc hydro having terrible years with an insufficient streamflow to generate hydro electricity and keep their reservoirs full the inadequacy of the columbia river treaty which is allowed the error lakes in british columbia to go to very very low levels while supplying the americans according to the terms of the treaty all these other things need to be looked at and we it shows us we need to look at our boundary apportionments transboundary apportions and we need to manage water differently in this country according to river basins what's called the introgated river basin management instead of the piecemeal approach we make right now province by province with a very fragmented federal engagement in the whole process and also a process that has so far left indigenous communities with first nations off the table i think most people listening to this are just most canadians in general would consider canada an extremely water rich nation i mean we've even joked on this podcast before about a america eventually coming for our water do we understand that correctly and how much danger do these conditions put our simple not even thinking about it access to potable water and yes you can look at a map of canada and you see lots of lakes and sure enough canada stores 20% of the world's freshwater in its lakes but the flow of water down canadian rivers is not particularly high and those rivers tend to flow northward up into the arctic so where we have excess water is where we do not have our populations our big populations in the south and the great lakes saint lawrence in the southern prairies and southern valleys and british columbia many of these areas are a semi errant to sob hewitt particularly in the west and the great lakes have been reliable so far but the lake's store lots of water without necessarily having the inflows of water that we've been needed for high use and the great lakes are also threatened the snow packs in the great lakes headline space and have been declining precipitously in the last few decades the warming of the lake's lack of ice cover is increasing evaporation it was just 20 years ago we had a serious water problems with low water levels and we can expect those again in the future so even the great lakes saint lawrence is not necessarily secure and remember our food security comes a largely from the western prairie agriculture and that has been seriously impacted by drought in 2023 this can topple disabled our governments to govern of the northwest territories had to evacuate the territory due to wildfire gridge slave lake is at its lowest level ever recorded and the records go back to the 1930s saskatchewan went from a budget surplus to a budget deficit situation because of payouts for crops and wildfire and alberta a billion dollars off its surplus for someilar reasons so these are impoverishing houses well as destabilizing our government you've mentioned it a couple times and it's a term that maybe not everybody understands or certainly doesn't understand its relationship to the situation we're in now what is snowpack why is it so important to what we're discussing here well these seasonal snow back in canada provides about 3/4 of our stream flow when that melts and soaks into the ground they can't come out for many many months to spring and summer and keep some rivers flowing and replenishes our lakes and wetlands in our groundwater and the snow packs and snowfall have been declining in many parts of canada and the southern parts they've been increasing in northern parts of canada but there's very little population there and that those rivers slow norris so that's not helping us where we need the water and this is created challenges for prairie agriculture he had created the challenges for the town of mcbride the glaciers retreated there because of reduced snowpack in the mountains and then the reduced stopack itself reduced streamclothes so that quick ride started running out of water there's other communities at this situation a cumberland house of indigenous community in the saskatchewan river delta downstream of the rockies has a chuckle low water levels this year they've been digging a well to get through the winter and that's been settled since the 1770s at community and they've never had this problem before so many other bc communities have been short of water and have had to impose a severe drought but restrictions are get to the summer and this is because the low snow backs early stomach lack of snow so when we don't have that snow which is very reliable snow melts in the spring we can monitor it to measure it uber the winter and we know we're gonna get in the summer when we don't have that we're dependent upon the rainfall which is tends to be spotty pretty variable and beware falls often it comes too much too quickly and causes a flood and it's very very hard to predict so that's a very different situation for canada and given that most of our economy is water dependent and therefore snowfall dependent yet puts are our whole economic prosperity as well as our natural eco-system to risk i want to get into what this means in terms of what canadians will actually experience in 2024 and obviously there are a few ways in which this will manifest let's start first of all because you spoken about how important our agriculture supply from the prairies is what do we know now about the current situation and what the summer and harvest will look like vast wasp of the prairies are an extreme drought hand almost all the prairies are admirably dry to a moderate crowd or worse have that's a situation entering the winter what's followed though is the winter snowpack has not developed in any normal way saskatoon for instance received only rainfall in december for the first time in his history regina had no precipitation at all and so the prairies were so free well into january they have a little bit of snow no he had translated 2 about 8 mm of water equivalent which would evaporate in a one good day of crop growth in the summer so it's insignificant that puts the prairies at tremendous risk of drought in the spring particularly with an onion yellow which generally brings warmer weather to western canada and sometimes drier weather and so there's still time for some storms to come through there and maybe we'll get a rainy summer but it doesn't look like that and certainly environment can it is medium term and longer term forecasts are suggesting warmer than normal conditions over that region and often drier than normal conditions so that's one to pay attention to because so moisture reserves are exhausted in the region the reservoirs are had record low levels and so the area is which irrigate which is the small but economically important of the underground restrictions next year for the first time in the history of irrigation in western canada i think i know the answer to the next aspect i will ask about but i'd like you to kind of explain what we might see and how our problems might compound themselves year-over-year but assuming no miraculous storms come through or what can we expect that these drought conditions to do for wildfires and 24 compared to last year which was already impressidented yes last year the wildfires season started with a low snow pack that melted early and we have stopacks building app in the boreal forests that's rocanada that are lower than they were last year at this time and so with the warmer forecast which are causing early snow melt we could start off with a potentially worst fire season that we had last year all this hold there are many fires still burning in the north they are burning under the stove and they're waiting for that snow to melt and the heat to come back to flare app again so we know that there they smoke is evident in many places and others are waiting to flare app and for this say heat to return and it looks highly likely that it will i ask this question a lot when it comes to climate-related unprecedented times and i know that el nino is out there now at least in part impacting this but in general are these kind of winters leading to these kind of conditions going to become our new normal and if so you know you mentioned there are still wildfires burning from last year like how does it compound year-over-year yes i think important realizes this drought started before and emilio started we were in a long yeah phase at the time we should have been wetter and cooler and that we had unprecedented dry conditions in heat instead so that's showing that the systems have decoupled from el nino la nina to some degree we're seeing the overriding influence of climate warming on these signals and extremely warm sea temperatures influencing the coasts and precipitation patterns across the country so we're in a new game here and it's looking much more variable than the climate that we are used to in canada and that we have developed our agriculture and a water management 4 and it also looks that we can have severe droughts and heat waves even without air and unusual that would probably just be exacerbated by they those come so when there's lots to worry about in 24 many scientists have predicted it could be even hotter than 2023 have become the hottest year in human recent history i feel like that's just a given now from 1 year to the next yeah it all 2022 is the hottest year and then 23 and then 24 so if you're betting it's a good pet that discarries on and the course our greenhouse gas calls aside aside obviously from taking the scale of the climate emergency seriously globally and nationally more practically what could we be doing given what we already know to prepare for another incredibly dry year in these affected areas yes there's walks we can do canadians have been very active water managers we have lots of reservoirs and dams around the country 50 farmers are credibly innovative and adaptive and how they cope with things so we need to store water now where we can and that means taking a hit on hydro electricity generation but we need to store that water to sufficient streamflow in the spring and summer should our snow backs remain low which looks likely at this point farmers need to adopt careful management practices choosing crop center use less water and they generally have a selection and there's a few in there that are more drought tolerant and that means picking those irrigators have to prepare for the eventuality that they may not get the full irrigation about until they would need and so again that means making sure that you're getting high value crops that are worth it in not the lower value and the livestock producers are already calling their herds and reducing their herds because of lack of grazing and feed and unfortunately that you probably need to continue to do that to remain viable and then finally our interprevention agreements are very modest agreements very a light agreement and i'm not sure that they will be up for the water balance management challenges we will have in 24 and i think they need to be revisited we have a brand new canada water agency at the federal level and we needed to become active to help the provinces to manage this water and to assure equitable sharing of water for various uses in and between provinces deal with the american border which most of canadian water is transboundary with the us has you mentioned that's one that needs to be looked at very carefully and also for insurance and indigenous communities are getting their fair share of water drive they have shared very poorly in our locations and in water quality and that needs to be improved so we can do much better and i think we have the knowledge and capacity there but you know we need things like a national flood and drought forecasting system we don't have 1 where the only g7 country without that these things need to be implemented made fully public to allow people to prepare and plan for the child there's a we have ahead of all that stuff that you just listed what percentage of it would you estimate exactly being tackled the canada water agency bills before parliament and the agency has been set app as part of environment canada so that's great there's another bill before parliament to establish a national drought and flood forecasting service at the federal level cooperatively with the provinces it's a private member's bill but i hope something like that passes the provinces such as alberta have taken this very very seriously and are i have an all hands-on deck approach to ensuring that water is managed appropriately and in british columbia is also preparing it stroke plans for the next year so i think it has been taken seriously but we still have a ways to go the national wildfire fighting service it has not been created yet and we could have a worse wildfire year coming app than we had last year and last year just exhausted our resources and we relied on help with wildfire fighters from our around the world we can't deal with that every year we can't call in the military every time we have a drought or a wildfire or a flood we have to build a manager's in a more prepared way and have the capacity they're provincially infectably and locally to deal with these extreme disasters because we can't be seen among the regular basis john guess it thank was you so better news but i'm glad to be able to understand the scope of what's going on right now thanks again thank you john palmeroy hydrologist at the university of saskatchewan that was the big story for more including lots of other depressing climate news you can head to the big story podcast.ca you can always ask us questions or offer us feedback via email hello at the big story podcast.ca is that address or you can call and leave us a voicemail 4169355935 is that phone number the big stories and all your favorite podcast players and on your smart speakers if you ask them to play the big story podcast
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