Guest Columnist: Josée Miville-Dechêne
Party like it’s 2064…
In the midst of the most severe economic crisis of our time, Calgary sits pretty between the Bow and the Elbow, its feathers mostly unruffled, its spirits high. This is the land of plenty. Roots just opened a flagship store near the downtown core, Calgarians are flocking to see the Broadway musical Hairspray, the Stampeders won the Cup and the ‘City of Champions’ remains the one bright spot on the Canadian retail landscape.
According to an Angus-Reid online survey, Albertans are the most upbeat about Canada’s economy, with 67 per cent of respondents giving a good rating to the national economy, compared to 42 per cent nationally and 29 per cent in Ontario.
All is good on the western front and its oil-rich metropolis.
Calgary is a well managed city. It enjoys a high level of citizen approval for services and programs, ranging from residential garbage collection to City-run recreational facilities. A green leader, the city adopted an environmental management system, or EMS in 1999 and is the first North American city to have achieved ISO 14001 certification, the EMS standard of the International Organization for Standardization. Calgary has also implemented a wide range of environmental measures to help reduce its footprint: A Montreal Gazette article published on November 28 states that Calgary City departments have reduced their greenhouse gases by 44 per cent.; 75 per cent of electricity in municipal buildings is produced by a 85-MegaWatt wind farm built by the city-owned utility company; a city bylaw limits sales of anything but low-flow toilets and the city’s fleet includes 180 hybrid cars and light trucks, while all garbage and recycling trucks run on biodiesel.
Calgary runs one of the better water and wastewater treatment plants in the country. The City invested $100 million in the 1994 expansion of the Bonnybrook Wastewater Treatment Plant to effectively serve Calgary’s growing population and to meet the new and more-stringent effluent standards. The City also has an ongoing Leak Detection Program and a Main Replacement Program to proactively reduce the amount of treated water that is lost each year due to leaks and main breaks.
There is however an elephant in the room. The threat of increasing water shortage.
Calgary is located in one of Canada’s driest regions. In recent years, the area’s temperatures have been rising, precipitation patterns have been changing and river flows have declined. These patterns are expected to continue. The city’s population is projected to double by 2064. Its sole water supply comes from the Elbow and the Bow Rivers with their headwaters in the Rockies. (Municipal Case Studies – Climate Change and the Planning process)
Through a provincial licensing system, the city is limited to maximum annual and daily withdrawals and it must share the water resource with high-demand industrial and agricultural users within the watershed.
In 2005, Natural Resources Canada partnered with the City of Calgary to undertake a study of future water demand in the Calgary Region and quantify the future impacts of climate change on water supplies. The results suggest that the city will need to achieve a 50% reduction in per capita use by 2064 in order to provide a sustainable water supply.
The same study also projects that Calgary, Canada’s fastest growing city, is on pace to break through the one million population mark by 2009. Actually Calgary’s population grew from 1,019,942 in April 2007 to 1,042,892 in April 2008, an increase of 2.25%.
Other early climate change predictions forecasted that the melting of the Arctic ice shelf would open the Northwest Passage by 2030…the first commercial ship navigated the passage earlier this month. Meanwhile an article published today (December 1, 2008) on CNews says that water in Venice has risen to its highest level in more than 20 years, leaving much of the Italian city under floods and forcing residents and tourists to wade through knee-high water.
University of Alberta, David Schindler, a leading authority on the topic has likened an assessment of Alberta’s current situation to “the view from the locomotive, 10 seconds before the train crash. Sometime in the coming century, the increasing human demand for water, the increasing scarcity of water due to climate warming, and one of the long droughts of past centuries will collide, and Albertans will learn first-hand what water scarcity is all about.” he said in 2006.
Could it be that ‘sometime in the next century’ is less than 10 seconds away?
Perhaps the city should party while the going is good.
Click here…to read the full water.ca report.
Josée Miville-Dechêne, Publisher/Editor water.ca.
For more information please visit: www.water.ca