With the lowest unemployment rate in the country, a booming economy and population growth to match, Alberta is enjoying its time in the limelight. The province's wealth and power is fuelled by little more than a coincidence of nature: trillions of barrels of oil happen to be buried under it. But while Alberta is blessed with abundance in one resource, another, arguably more precious resource is growing scarce: water.
Call it karmic retribution, or maybe just part of a larger worldwide trend, but global warming is altering the province's water supply: first by causing the glaciers to recede, which affects the amount of melt-off flowing into rivers; second, by wreaking havoc on precipitation patterns.
By now, most Albertans have probably heard rumblings that the major rivers supplying the province's water needs — particularly those feeding Calgary and Edmonton — will be reduced to mere trickles within the next 30 years as a result of receding glaciers. This may be a "well-intentioned hyperbole," according to Shawn Marshall, a University of Calgary Geologist, but the glaciers are disappearing, and fast.
"They are retreating before our eyes," says Marshall, who studies glaciers in the Canadian Rockies. Every year, says Marshall, the glaciers he measures are receding by 5 to 10 meters as well as thinning by roughly one meter.
A 2000 study showed a 25 percent decrease in glacial cover in the Rockies since the mid-nineteenth century. In some parts of the Rockies, such as in Kananaskis, that figure is as high as nearly 40 percent. One need only visit Columbia Icefield's Athabasca Glacier to see the decline. Since the late 1800s, the glacier has retreated by a kilometer and a half.
Glacial recession has been occurring gradually since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but this natural process has become accelerated over the last few decades because of global warming; the 1990s saw the highest proportion of glacial retreat of any decade last century.
South of the border, the problem appears even more pronounced. Many scientists fear that within the next 20 years, for example, Glacier National Park in Montana may be almost out of glaciers.
It sounds like an almost apocalyptical prediction: glaciers worldwide are retreating at an ever-accelerating pace, even facing extinction mid-century. But does it really spell disaster for the world's water supply? Not necessarily. At least not in Alberta.
While some areas of the world do depend almost exclusively on glaciers to feed their water needs — such as those in the Andes of South America, where glaciers are retreating faster than anywhere else on earth — this isn't the case in the Canadian prairies.
"By the time you get down to say, Calgary or Edmonton… glacier melt water [accounts for] only one or two percent of the flow on an annual basis," says Robert Halliday, a Saskatchewan-based water planning and management consultant and former director of the Water Institute in Saskatoon.
However, this proportion fluctuates with the weather, becoming higher the drier it is, says Halliday. "[In] a dry year, glacier melt is even a larger percentage, so it goes from one or two percent on an annual basis… to probably 10 or 20 percent." During late summer and early fall, that percentage can rise significantly higher.
For Calgary's largest river, the Bow, a normal average of four to eight percent glacial water content during the period from 1970 to 1998, rose to anywhere between 28 and 50 percent in years with little rainfall, says Nancy Stalker, a senior resource analyst with the City of Calgary waterworks. "That is where we are concerned."
Most of the water in the rivers of Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan is actually from melting snowpacks, not from glaciers. But here, too, global warming is creating a formidable challenge. With temperatures in the Rockies on the rise, precipitation is falling less as snow, and more in the form of rain, which then flows directly into the ground rather than melting into the rivers in the spring and summer months.
"The Rockies have been getting drier, but overall there have been precipitation increases, even in places like Calgary. So the diminishing snowpack and disappearing glaciers are in spite of this overall increase in precipitation," says Marshall.
According to Dr. David Schindler, a professor of Ecology at the University of Alberta, global warming has driven temperatures up by about 2°C in Banff's Lake Louise since 1970. Lowland sites have seen an increase of 2-4°C, "and that much again is projected," he says.
So, combine the impacts of reduced snowpacks and disappearing glaciers with Alberta's growing population, industrial demands, and irrigation needs for agriculture, and we're in for some trouble.
There are a variety of approaches the Alberta government could take to keep the rivers flowing consistently year-round, but none are too practical. In Switzerland, technicians have begun wrapping glaciers in insulating foam to preserve them during the summer.
Many parts of the world rely heavily on underground water aquifers—a layer of rock or soil that retains water—to meet their water needs, but this may not work long-term. In China, the rivers that are fed by aquifers are now running dry in summer months as too much water is being extracted from them. In Alberta, so little is known about the size or health of the underground aquifers that it's questionable whether they can help meet the province's water needs in the future. One of the more viable solutions may be to construct more dams to ensure a consistent water supply year-round.
"It is not hard to imagine the need for additional dams or reservoirs to act in the stead of the glaciers and snowpack, to ensure a late-summer water supply," says Marhsall. "This is the last thing that Banff National Park needs!"
Whether it's building reservoirs, tapping aquifers, or wrapping glaciers in foam, expenses associated with water will increase. But higher costs for water may not be a bad thing, particularly if you are trying to change water consumption habits, which will be a necessary component of any future water management scheme.
"What I would like to see is a little broader public education so that people in cities and in rural Alberta know why this is an issue, and what they can do to help all of us solve the problem," says Lee Jackson, professor of Biological Science at the University of Calgary.
"North Americans, Canadians included, use the most water per capita on a daily basis and we pay the least amount in the world" says Jackson, noting that things are different in Europe. "I spent a summer in Denmark in 2003, and they pay I think the highest price for water and they use about a third of what we do on a daily basis, and that's because they just do not have the volumes of water we do… and they still have a high quality of life."
Nowhere is water over-consumption in our daily lives more obvious than with our toilets. In Europe, says Jackson, the standard toilet is three or six litres. In North America, until recently, it was 20 litres. The City of Calgary is now offering rebates for residents to trade in their old toilets for more efficient models. It's all part of a plan to reduce water usage by 30 percent in 30 years — an ambitious goal for a city that's growing by some 2,000 people per month.
In addition to the major municipalities' water needs, industry and agriculture are also facing an imminent dilemma.
"We have a whole suite of competing users all wanting to have access to water as a resource. We have basically a pie that we think is shrinking, that we're going to have to slice up," says Jackson.
The province, says Jackson, will have to consider water use in its economic development plans by weighing potential economic gains against the amount of water required then comparing that with alternative uses for that water.
This is the reasoning behind Alberta's Water for Life Strategy, which is currently analyzing the province's water needs in agriculture, industry, and for municipalities.
"There are three outcomes that we are trying to achieve through our water for life strategy: safe, secure drinking-water, healthy aquatic ecosystems, and reliable, quality water supplies for a sustainable economy," describes Beverly Yee Assistant Deputy Minister for Alberta Environment.
Ultimately, solutions will have to come at all levels will have to do more than just tweak the system. Jackson says some potential options could be changing irrigation methods, developing more water-efficient technologies and possibly switching to crops that are less water-dependent. "I think we're going to have to start thinking about those kinds of changes, 'cause we're not going to be able to control the weather, we're not going to be able to control the climate."
With Additional reporting by Omid Ghoreishi in Edmonton and Mike Wing in Calgary.
Feeds