The question above was partially answered by a research project called the Blue Economy Initiative involving a team of authors from the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation, Canadian Water Network and RBC Blue Water Project.
Among the impressive list of authors is Professor Steven Renzetti, an environmental economist and one of Canada's biggest thinkers on the economics of water. You can read a summary here, which features an interview between Water Canada and Professor Renzetti. The report finds that water is responsible for a contribution to Canada's economy of between $7.8 and $22.9 billion.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
"We just don’t know what the value of water is in Canada today. That’s the biggest concern. We’re making decisions on public capital and infrastructure and improving water quality, but we don’t have enough information to determine whether these decisions are sound. As usual, it’s a typical academic result in that we don’t know enough and we should.
To promote dialogue about how water contributes to the economy, people need to understand the wide range of ways from which we derive benefits from it. We need to have more experience and knowledge on measuring these values so we can incorporate them into decision making and protect the resource. Another worry is that we’re falling behind. When you look at places such as the European Union and China, they have large research programs aimed at informing decision makers about biodiversity and ecosystems. Here, we have lots of scientists worrying about the chemical and physical natures of water, but we don’t know about its economical nature. It means we’re not going to make good decisions".
Read the full interview here.
No comments:
Post a Comment