As he prepared to address a conference about the increasing instability of western Canadian weather, Bob Sandford’s son texted him with the perfect prop:
“The river is destroying everything right now,” the text said. “It’s nuts. The river’s gone wild here.”
It wasn’t a setup. The river truly was destroying substantial parts of Sandford’s home town of Canmore, Alta., as heavy rain created massive, flash flooding that has damaged communities from Canmore to Calgary to High River to Medicine Hat.
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While seeming like a freak event, Sandford’s main point in his pres-entation to the Keeping Water On The Land conference in Winnipeg was that sudden floods, profound drought and other forms of weather, although seen as extreme, are likely to become much more common than in the past.
That’s going to be a problem for farmers who rely on the weather being somewhat predictable.
The recent odd collection of floods, droughts, early springs, late springs and heavy rainstorms might become the new normal.
“What we’re seeing in North America is that it’s not so much warming (as a problem), as a destabilization of the historic weather patterns,” said Sandford.
“It appears the central Great Plains region may have passed over a threshold into a new hydro-climatic state which, if not properly managed, could over time bankrupt Canadian jurisdictions like Manitoba,” said Sandford, who heads the Western Watersheds Climate Research Collaborative. He also advises the United Nations and has a book coming out in October called Saving Lake Winnipeg.
Farmers across North America have been unsettled by a string of extreme weather incidents that have crippled production in large regions. More than a quarter of Manitoba’s farmland and much Saskatchewan farmland was left unseeded after widespread spring flooding in 2011.
The U.S. southern Plains have suffered three years of drought. The U.S. Midwest, which usually has stable weather, suffered a devastating drought in 2012.
Farmers’ confidence in being able to rely upon normal weather patterns has been shaken.
The Prairies had very early springs for two years, which allowed farmers to confidently begin planting substantial acreages of crops such as corn and soybeans that are usually too long-season to be dared.
Then came this year’s late spring, which saw winter linger far longer than at any time in recent history.
The Keeping Water On The Land conference was focused on finding ways to control both flooding and water pollution throughout the entire Lake Winnipeg basin, which contains almost all of Western Canada’s farmland as well as hundreds of thousands of square kilometres in four U.S. states.
The key idea being developed by scientists, hydrologists, engineers and water control theorists is that if more water could be held back on prairie fields and only slowly and carefully be released, then the surge of water that can occur after heavy rainfalls or fast spring melts could be minimized.
Practical methods of doing this include reestablishing wetlands, building dugouts and creating sections or quarter sections that could be used to temporarily house large amounts of water when surges occur.
The prime, practical concern of the people involved in these efforts is to stop the degradation of water bodies such as Lake Winnipeg and to re-verse the damage.
However, Sandford’s speech highlighted the danger of the prairie situation: drastic action needs to be taken to stop the situation going far beyond merely polluting lakes. The very basis of prairie farming and the prairie economy could be at stake.
“Agriculture matters, and sustaining Great Plains agriculture is critical,” said Sandford. “We have to find a way to deal with this challenge.”
The recent extreme weather events might just be the beginning of a new era of instability.
“In a uniformly warmer and therefore more turbulent atmosphere, both warm and cold fronts end up and persist in places that were not common in the past, often causing floods and droughts of magnitudes that we are poorly equipped to manage.”
