Quenching the world's thirst: Realistically, Canada won't be exporting its water anywhere
By Chris Wood | Water Canada – 12 hours agoIt could be a national joke: How do you get a bunch of polite Canadians to start an argument? Suggest selling our water.
The idea that a thirsty world — more particularly a thirsty America — will someday cast envious eyes on Canada’s water bounty is a universally shared conviction in this country. Not quite so complete, but nearly, is an outraged rejection of the idea of ever exporting any of that bounty to anyone. Especially not to the Yanks.
 Chris Wood iis an independent Canadian journalist. He is the author of Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America and, with Ralph Pentland, Down the Drain: How We Are Failing to Protect Our Water Resources. Next month, he returns to his home on Vancouver Island after a two-year research sabbatical in Mexico. |
However popular, this is a little like debating the merits of a gin and tonic as against a martini in the bar of the Titanic. Yes, the world is growing thirsty — much of it desperately so. But for numerous reasons exporting Canada’s water would not save the world even if we did it. And in any case, the physics say we can’t.
Let’s take one of the most frequently imagined cases: a parched California (rather like the one we’re seeing) catches sight of all that blue on the map of Canada. California’s annual water consumption, averaged over drought and non-drought years, is about 100 km3. Meeting even one-third of that would require, just as an example, diverting the entire annual flow of Alberta’s Athabasca River — and two more just as big.
Water is also heavy; you can check this for yourself by hoisting a case of bottled water some time. Moving the water contained in even one Athabasca River, for only one year, would take as much effort as moving 133 of America’s largest aircraft carriers, fully loaded, from Fort McMurray to, let’s say, Stockton, Calif.
Neither of these things will happen. There is physically not enough water to be moved to rescue all the places on the planet that are falling into water shortage. And attempting such a delivery — whether by building infrastructure or transporting the water — would release vast additional quantities of greenhouse gasses, exacerbating the very climate change that, along with human folly and excess, have led us into water shortages to begin with.
Canada could not export the world’s way out of its water crisis even if we wanted to. So here are a couple of hydrological facts, and a prediction.
The first fact is that while water is global in its circulation, its supply is always local, and the most critical determinant of its sufficiency is always how people manage their own landscapes and practices.
Forests, riparian greenbelts, permeable urban surfaces that encourage rainfall to penetrate soils; practices that reduce water use (and, handily, also reduce energy consumption); local water markets that direct available supplies to the most efficient and highest-return economic uses; these are the kinds of effective response that can only be implemented by water-stressed societies themselves. In this, I’m more optimistic for California than for places like Sudan or Syria.
My prediction: Many of those places that are running out of water will not solve their problems. To extend the Titanic metaphor into unintended irony: they will hit the iceberg and many will die. Conflict regions will expand (it’s already been suggested that water stress has contributed to the warfare in the Middle East). Societies will devolve and there will be significant downsizing of some human populations.
My prediction: Many of those places that are running out of water will not solve their problems. To extend the Titanic metaphor into unintended irony: they will hit the iceberg and many will die. Conflict regions will expand. Societies will devolve and there will be significant downsizing of some human populations.
But here is another fact: while places like California and Australia and sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean basin dry out, Canada is getting wetter. Only parts of it, mind you; and not the parts where it might be useful to most of us. Southern Canada is actually getting drier. But the far northwest (northern British Columbia, southern Yukon) and northeast (northern Quebec) are getting enough additional rain and snow to more than make up for that.
In a world where climate change giveth and climate change taketh away, climate change is giving to Canada. Except that the extra water we’re receiving is largely what climate change is taking away from others. In that light, those others might well argue that we’re enjoying what was not ours, while contributing far more than most of humanity is to the changes that are redirected ‘their’ water our way.
Depending on the desperation levels reached in other countries, that suggests at least the possibility of international demands that some of the redirected water be returned, with or without Canada’s consent. Desperation doesn’t change the problem with the physics however.
Two scenarios are plausible, both involving relatively small (tanker-size) shipments of high-quality fresh water: as humanitarian relief for human consumption; and as a ‘premium’ beverage water to places where the quality of local supplies is increasingly suspect like China, India and the Middle East.
But again, physics. The state of Alaska has had bulk water from its rivers on commercial offer for a couple of decades now, and so far no investor has leapt at it.
Meanwhile, our obsession with imaginary bulk water exports obscures a far more important third reality: Canada already ‘exports’ vast amounts of water in the form of fossil fuel energy and food products.
The first use may be debatable, but does at least drive some jobs in Alberta and B.C. The second, however, is a Canadian engagement in the global marketplace that is already contributing enormously to the survival of foreign populations. Without the ability to import water as food several parts of the world (the Middle East again) would be starving by now.
Exporting water as food is more efficient that exporting it as water, which is one reason why there’s a thriving market for the former and none for the latter. But here we meet yet another overlooked hydrological fact: the regions where Canadians grow most of our crops are themselves climate water losers, not gainers.
If we’re going to debate bulk water shipments, moving some within Canada to expand our farm production is actually a more feasible idea in physics than some others. But even that is infeasible in politics … again, depending on that desperation factor.
Water Canada is the complete water magazine, covering environmental health, urban infrastructure, science and technology, law, policy and governance, and the national economy for “water nerds” who regularly read the publication in print and online across the country.
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