WIRA: A platform for Water-centered Integrated Resource Assessment in Canada

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Water is central to the Canadian economy as it is a fundamental resource for multiple economic sectors, as well as for recreational activities and ecosystem health. Therefore, sustainable water resource management is important for Canadian socioeconomic security. Integrated water resources management (IWRM) has been proposed for making decisions on water allocation to different users based on the availability of water resources. However, IWRM is limited in terms of both implementation and influence on policy makers. The two main reasons for its limited use and influence are (i) the need for IWRM to be applied to a river basin, which is irrelevant to administrative boundaries where decisions and policies are made and (ii) the implicit assumption in IWRM that water availability is the single driving force for water allocation and distribution decisions, yet society has multiple needs for water, energy, and food (WEF) in an economy driven by production maximization activities. The WEF needs dictate an integrated and simultaneous assessment and management of WEF resources (the WEF nexus) and, thus, the overarching question is how to reframe and solve the water resource management problem in a realistic and comprehensive context that addresses the societal needs for integrated WEF resources. The long-term objective of this research program is to develop water-centered integrated resource assessment (WIRA) as a realistic, and adoptable by policy makers, platform for integrated resource assessment in Canada. Although national in scope, WIRA will be initially developed as a province- or territory- based tool that simulates water, energy, and food production and consumption, integrating natural systems with societal development and infrastructure. WIRA will eventually be coupled with global food and energy trade models to include imports and exports into the assessment of Canadian resource use. Specific short-term objectives for the next five years (2019-2024) are: (i) To develop an integrated demand-driven WEF nexus model for the province of Saskatchewan. WEF-Sask will be the nucleus of the WIRA platform, where all of the inter-relationships and feedbacks among the three sectors will be perceived and quantified for the first time in Canada. Subsequently, WEF-Sask will be expanded to cover the Canadian Prairie provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) as one unit (WEF-Prairie); and (ii) To develop a tool to assess and quantify the water footprint of the energy sector in Canada with the model interfacing with global models of energy trade to assess Canada's exports and imports of water in the form of energy. This research will help evaluate the sustainability and use efficiency of WEF nexus, along with impacts on the economy and environment. The main innovative aspects of the proposed research are (i) linking the Canadian WEF model to the global food and energy trade, and (ii) being a realistic, explicitly integrated resource demand-driven model.