Rural residents should prepare now for less water and poorer water quality, a University of Alberta biologist told a university audience here.
David Schindler, speaking at the Woodrow Lloyd lecture at the University of Regina, said expansion of cropland, elimination of wetlands and climate change are affecting water quantity and quality.
He said communities with small- or medium-sized water systems would be worse off than large cities with up-to-date technology.
“I think we’re on the verge of disaster,” he said.
He predicted more Walkerton-type problems, where the municipal water system became contaminated with E. coli.
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He said people must take responsibility for water conservation to head off problems.
“We know exactly what we need to do.”
In Western Canada, the glaciers that are the headwaters for the major river systems have receded by about 25 percent in the last 100 years. Snow pack is declining, resulting in less melt and reduced river flows in the spring.
The average temperature has climbed two degrees in the last 30 years and climate predictors agree there will be another degree or two of warming by 2050.
“If the climate modelers are right, we can expect some hot old times ahead,” Schindler said.
Farmers coped with the drought of 2001-2003 because of better farming practices, but as the climate warms, droughts will become more frequent. He noted that the last century was unusually wet, despite the droughts.
Mud core samples show that between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago there was a time when Lake Manitoba was dry.
Agricultural development coupled with these other factors will compound water problems.
New agricultural land is being broken on the edge of the boreal forest, and 70 percent of surface wetlands on the Prairies were eliminated in the last century.
The desire to “get every last scrap of land under pasture or cultivation” is reducing the amount of water available to act as a nutrient filter.
“Turning a forest into a grassland doubles the nutrients received by a lake or river,” Schindler said.
Many freshwater bodies are suffering from eutrophication; they’ve become too rich in dissolved nutrients.
The result is an increase in algal blooms that harm other wetland life.
Human health will also be at risk because of an increase in pathogens and escalating water treatment costs.
During a question and answer session he was asked about a Saskatchewan plan to develop water-based industry by building more dams. Schindler said dams are great for those who live near them, but not those who live downstream and he suggested the high-flow water events needed to rejuvenate reservoirs won’t necessarily exist.
