When the North West Mounted Police built Fort Calgary at the confluence of the Elbow and Bow rivers in 1875, part of the attraction was proximity to water.
In slightly more than a century, Calgary has grown to more than one million people and Alberta has a population of 3.4 million, with projections of five million in another 25 years.
Alberta water watchers warn this kind of growth cannot continue because there is not enough fresh water to keep everyone’s ambitions flowing.
The South Saskatchewan River basin, with its sources high in the snowy Rockies, supplies water to southern Alberta and southern Saskatchewan through an interprovincial agreement that requires Alberta to pass on 50 percent of the flow.
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Two years ago, Alberta placed a moratorium on further licences to withdraw water from the river basin. Now, new developments must negotiate with current permit holders to get water.
The issue that recently sparked public attention was the Balzac development, a $1 billion casino and mall proposal north of Calgary in the Municipal District of Rocky View. The MD approved the development but didn’t have water allocation to serve it. Construction stopped as one municipality after another refused to provide water.
Finally, an offer came from the Western Irrigation District (WID). Rocky View agreed to pay $15 million to upgrade WID’s crumbling water delivery system, thus saving about 2,000 acre feet of water, and in exchange the project could have the conserved water. Final approval rests with Alberta Environment.
That deal provoked public debate about the value of water and what might happen when the developers of the next big proposal cannot procure water.
“We have this problem where we are approaching a nexus where there is a number of things all coming together,” said Alan Gardner of the Southern Alberta Land Trust Society, a landowner group working to protect southwestern watersheds.
He and others worry there is no overarching plan to share the resource, despite ever increasing demand from residential acreages, suburbs, intensive livestock operations, mining, oil, gas and forestry.
“They operate on a cumulative basis to damage the watershed,” he said.
Part of the problem is the tendency for each government department to work independently and jealously protect its mandate. The provincial land use planning framework launched earlier this year involves seven ministries but little space was devoted to divvying up water.
“There is nothing in Alberta that pulls all of these things together into a logical, rational and intelligent planning structure,” Gardner said.
Besides land use planning, the province launched a program called Water for Life four years ago.
Brad Stelfox, whose company Forem Technologies studies the effect of development on the environment, argued the two plans should be blended into a watershed strategy to involve all users and make people understand that fresh water is precious and rare.
Industry and municipal growth plans have already stretched the demand for water too far, Stelfox added.
“We’ve got too many straws in the milkshake,” he said.
A great unknown is how climate change will affect the province’s water supply.
Southern Alberta can expect more precipitation in a warmer climate but also more evaporation for a net reduction in the amount of water flowing into rivers. This is where government needs to show leadership.
“Existing policy doesn’t guide us to where we need to go in terms of conservation or the amount of water that needs to stay in streams,” Stelfox said.
Alberta needs tougher conservation policies to encourage installation of water metering, appliance water saving devices, low flow toilets and showers, he added.
“Water is too important so why do we treat it with such a cavalier attitude?”
A water institute at the University of Lethbridge is looking at these issues, pointing out action must start now because environmental changes will not come in gentle curves but in radical spurts.
U of L geologist Jim Byrne said politicians have forgotten about the impact development has on the environment as well as the resource debt left to future generations.
“There is a limit to growth. Do we actually have to deteriorate Alberta to a horrible state before we admit: that is our limit to growth?”
Society needs a balance sheet on water use and conservation because today’s decisions affect future generations, said Bill Berzins, chair of the Bow River Council, a volunteer watershed advisory group with 150 members from business, agriculture, municipalities, individuals and First Nations.
Besides a shortage of surface water, Berzins worries the province lacks good data on ground water supplies at a time when some industries are interested in exploiting aquifers without considering the ecological affects.
“We may be cataloguing our demise,” Berzins said.
“Some people think we should take more urgent action to protect the ground water and understand how ground water is crucial to recharging surface water.”
Alberta has alluvial aquifers, which are narrow ribbons of water that parallel rivers on the surface. Bedrock aquifers are deep deposits.
“It is the aquifer that provides the buffering to surface water. It is the slow release of water to the river system. So it is one thing how we manage surface water. It is just as important, long term, how we manage the aquifer,” he said.
His group wants more aggressive action on water protection and conservation because southern Alberta’s water resources are pushed to the limit. Rather than activism, he is interested in leadership that provides a new model of governance to guide good decisions for the next seven generations.
He suspects most people do not see the situation as critical and probably believe damage is reversible.
“We’re in a serious situation because we continue to develop right to the river’s edge whenever possible,” he said. That destroys riparian areas needed to restore aquifers, control water flow, purify it and support a healthy environment.
“Water is priceless but costs nothing,” Berzins said.
“All of our impacts show a slight degradation of water quality so our culture is to rationalize and justify this tremendous degradation on the basis of science and profitability, but at some point the cumulative impacts on our water system hit a ledge.”
