Earlier this week, the B.C. government issued a drought warning, urging residents and businesses to conserve water.
But according to Rosie Simms, a research lead and project manager for the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project, the Province needs to step up its act. She said that B.C. is “stuck in a crisis response mode.”
“So when drought hits, like now, there’s a call for voluntary action. But often that’s too little, too late,” Simms said. “Sometimes there will be regulatory action to shut off water use in a few different watersheds.”
Simms was part of the team that worked on a report called Drought Ready, researching B.C.’s past decade of droughts and drought management.
“There’s a clear trend in the province that droughts are getting more severe in British Columbia; they’re not just temporary summer emergencies in a few places anymore,” she said.
“They’re lasting longer, they’re more intense, they’re affecting more of the province, and they’re causing much more extreme damage across a whole bunch of different sectors — to our rivers, to our fish, to our communities.”
Currently, Simms said that 65 per cent of the province is experiencing some level of drought, with ongoing warm and dry weather expected.
Why are droughts getting worse?
There are a number of factors contributing to B.C.’s worsening droughts, with climate change a significant one — and something that will keep driving this trend.
“It’s throwing our hydrology and our hydrological systems into entirely new regimes,” Simms said.
This includes hotter, drier summers. It also means that there’s less snowpack in the mountains, reducing summer flows and subsequent refilling of groundwater sources. Further, climate change is causing glacier loss, affecting glacial-fed water systems and resulting in a permanent loss of future water storage and supply.
Drought has had a number of dire impacts in B.C.
Simms noted that they look different depending on the location, but have included “dangerously low” drinking water in certain regions like the Sunshine Coast and Tofino, fish die-offs due to hot water and low flows, impacts on agriculture, and even consequences to energy production. Simms said that low water reservoirs were a contributing factor to BC Hydro importing energy in 2023.
“We’re seeing this as much more of a whole of society issue, and that requires a whole of society approach,” Simms said.
How can B.C. manage drought better?
Despite this bleak outlook, Simms maintained that there is still much B.C. can do to manage drought better.
“Drought isn’t just an act of God. It’s not something that happens to us, and really, our choices about how we use land and water really matter,” she said. “A future with much worse drought impacts isn’t inevitable.”
Simms said that how B.C. currently manages water hasn’t “caught up” with the new drought reality in the province.
“It’s not necessarily that we don’t have solutions. This isn’t being given the priority required actually to invest and deliver the kind of solutions needed.”
B.C. already passed the Water Sustainability Act in 2016, which Simms said is a “good piece of legislation.”
While there has been some progress made, like the B.C. Drought Information Portal, Simms said the implementation has been slow and incomplete.
“Drought hasn’t been given hasn’t been seen as a priority, and it hasn’t been given the kind of resources and attention that it needs.”
For example, even on the Drought Information Portal, it defines drought as “a naturally recurring period of abnormally dry conditions that may result in water scarcity.”
The report Simms worked on recommends B.C. update this to include the fact that it is “caused or intensified by the interactions between climate variability and change, human water use and management, and changes to watershed storage and flows.”
Simms said that B.C. should prioritize fast-tracking watershed planning, to include things like water storage. They should also restore critical watersheds, as well as watershed features that help buffer and refill aquifers and provide water in summer months.
She said B.C. needs to take a hard look at its current water use and see if there are better ways to allocate it.
Simms added that there’s some low-hanging fruit, like reporting water use and having a better understanding of water budgets — meaning how much is available in the system and how much people are using.
“I think storage is an important part of the conversation, but equally or more important is looking at our existing levels of use and actually building in incentives and programs and regulation around water conservation and demand management and efficiency.”
For example, she said that B.C. needs to modernize its water rental rates, to ensure that industry “pays a fair price for water and that gets reinvested in communities.”
Currently, B.C. has among the lowest industrial water rates in the country.