Happy World Water Day!

This is our 401st post. We want to thank everyone who has taken the time to read, comment and contribute to Enviro Boys over the past two years. It has been real fun side project for the both of us (or as Chris says, "blogospheric experiment") and we hope to continue it going for years to come.

For the past two years, I have written a post on World Water Day (for 2009 see here, for 2010 see here). I have taken the time to sit down and reflect about how lucky I am to be living in a country where clean and affordable water is readily available by the turn of the tap. A feeling of fortune that the water managers and politicians who make decisions about water distribution, treatment, pricing and policy are all somewhat competent at their tasks to ensure that residents receive the water they need.

I also recognize the tremendous equity issues surrounding this fundamental resource. According to the UN, 2.8 million people die every year due to problems with poor water supply, sanitation and hygiene. Worse yet, 2.6 billion people are living without improved access to sanitation facilities. This amounts to a situation where water is simply not treated well and leads to serious water related illnesses including cholera and typhoid fever, for example, due to contaminated water.

Even closer to home we have many First Nations communities that are on boiling water advisories due to poorly treated water. If not boiling water advisories than it's bottled water which is not only an incredibly wasteful resource, but one that is expensive and inexcusable for a country that treats water relatively well. On the quantity front, residents of Vancouver (the city I am currently living in) consume much more potable water per capita than most urban centres in Canada; the average Vancouverite uses approximately 100 litres more per day at home. The Canadian average is about 343 litres per person per day which is 1.5 times more than Europe's residential water consumption.

These are a just a few facts and are not meant to paint a dismal picture. I refer to them to illustrate how critical this resource is to our existence and how unevenly distributed it is globally. We are fortunate in this country to have clean water and should take a moment to be thankful for that. But at the same time we should be asking ourselves what our level of knowledge is about water not only globally but locally. Do you know where your water comes from, where it is treated, how it is priced, the sorts of organizations that work on education and advocacy efforts? If not, it wouldn't hurt to learn. A good starting point to learn about water in Canada is here.

I wrote my honour's thesis on the topic of water. I am taking a graduate level course on water management and planning and I continue to love the resource (other than just academic contexts) for its beauty, its ability to keep me alive and for the aquatic ecosystems it supports.

Happy World Water Day!

Guest Post for Aguanomics

Check out my guest post for David Zetland's Aguanomics blog. It's co-authored by me and my friend, Erik.

"Over the past two months, we have had the fortune of researching an innovative and highly participatory project in one of our graduate courses at the School of Community and Regional Planning. Both of us had an interest in exploring groundwater in the developing world and were fortunate to stumble across an article in the Economist magazine entitled “Making Farmers Matter” with a focus on India. Why India you may ask? India is the world’s largest user of groundwater with an estimated 22 million wells. As Steven Solomon writes in his newest book, “in India's breadbaskets of Punjab and Haryana, the water tables are falling over three feet per year; monitored wells in the western state of Gujarat show a fall in the water table from 50 feet to over 1,300 feet in thirty years”. India accounts for 25% of the world’s total groundwater draw. Interested in more statistics?"

Read the whole post here.

GHG emissions in Canada

The following link, provided by the Conference Board of Canada, provides a useful breakdown of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions and how we compare to other countries.

 Image credit: Natural Resources Canada, 2011

• Canada ranks second-to-last out of 17 countries for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per capita and earns a “D” grade.
• Canada’s GHG emissions have increased by 32 per cent in 15 years.
• The largest contributor to Canada’s GHG emissions is the energy sector, which includes combustion, transportation, and fugitive sources. 

Check it out here.

Applying a water market system to restore an ecosystem

My friend DM, shared this video with me. It's an inspiring story about how farmers, industry and citizens have an incentive to conserve the amount of water they use and return it to degraded ecosystems (e.g. streams and creeks) that have seen water levels drop over the years. For years, senior water rights in places like Montana have allowed right holders to use copious amounts of water. Why wouldn't they use lots of water? If they don't use the water, they risk losing their water right. Talk about incentive to conserve!

Rob Harmon is now working with farmers to measure water and divide it into one thousand increments, each increment gets a serial number and a certificate. The brewers in the area are worried about their "water footprints" and branding images. They use a lot of water and need some mechanism to return it back to the ecosystem. So they buy those certificates to restore water to the ecosystem.

The market-based system developed by Rob Harmon is based on the utilization of incentives and providing the right information to water users about how they can save money and restore ecosystem integrity.

Groundwater challenges in Punjab, India

I delivered a presentation today in one of my classes called "Planning for Water Resource Management". My groupmate and I specifically discussed a participatory groundwater management project in the state of Andhra Pradesh located in South-Eastern India. I'll post a summary of our topic along with our presentation shortly. The video below discusses the contemporary challenges around groundwater overuse in the state of Punjab, India.

Farmers in Punjab are pumping groundwater beyond levels that are sustainable levels for their economic livelihood and for posterity. Farmers pump groundwater at profligate rates because they receive very generous water and electricity subsidies from the government. These subsidies do not give the farmers the proper signals of the value and true cost of these goods. While Punjab faces such challenges, states like Haryana, Rajasthan and Gujarat have also seen water tables drop due to excessive overpumping.

Our case study of Andhra Pradesh offers a contrast to the aforementioned through the utilization of a number of participatory methods that have engaged farmers to better understand the science of groundwater dynamics and strives toward behavioural change through groundwater conservation. More to come on this. In the meantime, please see the video below and understand that India's water challenges have several implications for the world including the international food market.



For more, see here.