Sustainable Water Systems in a Changing Climate

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It is currently well understood that climate change is altering the patterns of rainfall and snow, increasing temperature and impacting ice and permafrost melt, exacerbating existing water availability and quality issues, as well as increasing the frequency of water-related natural hazards. Impacts on water systems impose significant costs on Canadian society and the environment. The most recent examples cited from Public Safety Canada with damages from flooding alone reach about $1 Billion per year over the last several years. The Calgary flood of 2013 is often cited as one of the costliest natural disasters in Canadian history. By contrast, the drought on the Canadian prairies from 2001 to 2003 can also be considered equivalent. Canadian organizations, provinces, territories, institutions, water resources professionals and citizens themselves are ill-prepared to manage the new water-related risks. Successful adaptation to the coming realities requires public buy-in to the science of climate change; and the need to implement adaptation policies while reacting effectively to risk while remaining informed. Water is a local variable resource, and vulnerability to climate-related hazards such as the impacts from flooding and drought differs from one region to another. This vulnerability to hazards also stems from the failure of institutions to adequately prepare for and manage existing and evolving risks. In that regard, the province of Alberta and all the other provinces in Canada face special challenges, because of their large landmasses, diverse geography, cold-regions considerations and wide ranges of climate and hydrological regimes. Climate-induced change both in the atmosphere; and as they manifest on the landscape (e.g., forest fires) in parallel with changes in land use; and coupled with a broad range of consumptive and non-consumptive uses that control the timing and supply of water resources make managing and understanding the resource difficult. What is being proposed for the CRC is to advance the next generation of a community prediction framework that furthers new process understanding, data assimilation techniques, geo-spatial information within a modelling ecosystem that will allow for improved decision making and will support policy development and knowledge mobilization. The research will address water resources and related hydro-meteorological and hydro-climatic problems while focused on enabling sustainable management.