| Is Canada doing enough to conserve water? | martes, 5. abril 2011 |
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| 25 March 2011 World Water Day took place this week, and public attention in Canada as in many other countries was for a time focused on what clearly is our most valuable natural resource. Canada has about nine per cent of the world's water supply, according to Environment Canada, but only 0.5 per cent of the world's population. One might interpret this to mean our supplies of fresh water are more than adequate to meet all our needs. In fact, although Canada has significant amounts of fresh water, we possess only 7% of the world's renewable freshwater supply. On top of that, 84% of our population lives in a narrow southern band, while 60% of our water supply flows north to the Arctic Circle. Increasing pollution of surface and groundwater is further reducing the supplies of readily available, clean water, because our water use almost always leads to some degree of deterioration in water quality. Our growing population mainly concentrated in expanding metropolitan areas of the south and increased demands for fresh water for a variety of purposes is forcing regulators and policy makers to find ways to stretch available supplies even further through conservation measures. But according to some experts, Canada is falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to conserving our precious freshwater resource. A recent Conference Board report says Canada ranks 15th out of 16 peer countries when it comes to water conservation. Most of our water use (over 90%) goes toward thermal-electric power generation, manufacturing and agriculture. The rest is for residential use. Within the manufacturing sectors, pulp and paper, metals, chemicals, petroleum and coal, and food industries are the largest users of water. In some parts of the country, competing demands for water have raised the specter of shortages that could limit available supplies for households and/or industrial purposes. It is becoming abundantly clear that water is not a free good. Sooner or later it presents us with a bill, be it the cost to clean up polluted lakes and rivers, or the need to upgrade purification infrastructure. Compounding the problem is the fact that in many cases we pay less than the actual cost of processing and delivering water. Environment Canada estimates, for example, irrigation water charges recover only about 10% of the actual costs of the service. The same is true, to a less extreme extent, for water costs to householders. This leads to overuse of water and compared to many other countries, we pay very little of the true cost to have water delivered to our kitchen and bathroom faucets, and clearly if we are to improve our track record with respect to conservation of our water resources, we must be prepared to pay more for this life sustaining commodity. While changing our patterns of household water use is an important starting point, there has been an increased emphasis in recent years within the corporate sector to make better use of water they use. Significant gains have been made in our oil and gas sector in terms of the intensity of water use per unit of production. Suncor, a GLOBE Award for Environmental Excellence, reports major improvements in its recycling of waste water for its Edmonton refinery resulting in 5.5 million litres of treated waste water being reused instead of taking the equivalent amount of fresh water from the North Saskatchewan River. The company reports similar gains in the recycling of water used to separate bitumen from oil sands resulting significantly less water per unit of heavy oil produced. Other oil and gas are striving to achieve similar gains both in the amount of water they use and in the minimization of environmental impacts. |
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