The OHI focuses on three portfolio areas of
interest, Research,
Education, and Best
Practices, and undertakes Special
Projects, General information on these portfolios
can be found below, while recent current efforts are described under
Updates.
Research
- Research on headwater issues forms the foundation
of the OHI's work and the basis for education and engagement programs.
- Currently, the OHi is assessing regulatory
models for headwater protection and monitoring.
- General research was distilled in 2009 in
Introduction
to Freshwater and Headwater Issues, available
below in both html and as a PDF.
Education
- In late 2009 the OHI completed work on
a generic 25-minute presentation The
Importance of Headwaters, which can be delivered as a standalone
program or as part of a community workshop, both described under
Special Projects below and under Updates. Content includes an
introduction to headwaters and the hydrologic cycle, a photographic
slide show- Headwaters: The Foundation of our Watersheds – and
descriptions of the challenges, strengths, and opportunities we
face in preserving Ontario’s headwaters.
Best Practices
- OHI efforts on best practices include introductory
material contained in the presentation referred to above and inquiries
with key Ontario agencies on policies, protocols, and metrics
designed to implement and monitor headwater preservation under
the new definition of a watercourse as contained in the Conservation
Authorities Act of 2006: “ ‘ watercourse’ means an identifiable
depression in the ground in which a flow of water regularly or
continuously occurs.”
Special Projects
| March
27, 2009 |
Staged Preserving Ontario’s
Freshwater, a symposium
with over 100 attendees. Summarized under Updates
|
| March
4 - April 8, 2010 |
A series of seven community
workshops, delivered from Elora to Peterborough, on Preserving
Ontario’s Headwaters, funded by the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
See Updates. |
| May 11,
2010 |
Our second annual symposium:
Integrated Watershed Management in Ontario |
| Contents: |
A Global Perspective on Water
Freshwater in Ontario
The Importance of Headwaters
Ontario’s Headwaters
Preserving Ontario’s Headwaters |
A Global Perspective on Water
No new water is being created on our planet.
Instead,
water moves in a hydrological cycle, rising from oceans and forests,
condensing into clouds, falling back to the land, flowing through
the landscape, and returning to the oceans.
The water that we drink today might well have been
water that dinosaurs drank millions of years ago, or that formed
a part of the swells that Columbus sailed across to reach North
America.
Most of the water on the earth, however, is salt-water,
and much of the rest is locked in ice. Approximate distribution
is:
| Oceans: |
97.40 % |
| Ice caps, Glaciers and Groundwater |
2.58 % |
| Atmosphere, Rivers, Biota, Soil Moisture,
& Lakes |
.014 |
In other words, less than 3% of the world’s water
is freshwater. About two thirds of that is currently frozen, and
another good portion is underground, leaving a tiny fraction for
the five remaining categories that all living creatures must share.
Put another way, if all the earth's water could fit into a gallon
jug, the available freshwater would equal just over a tablespoon.
Humankind’s very existence depends on having access
to clean water. A person can live about a month without food, but
only about a week without water, while water that has been polluted
or that contains pathogens can make people sick, or worse. In fact,
the UN is currently discussing ways to elaborate a universal right-to-water.
For example, a committee of the International Covenant on Economic,
Social and Cultural Rights recently stated that:
The right to water contains both freedoms and
entitlements. The freedoms include the right to maintain
access to existing water supplies necessary for the right to water,
and the right to be free from interference, such as the right
to be free from arbitrary disconnections or contamination of water
supplies. By contrast, the entitlements include the right
to a system of water supply and management that provides equality
of opportunity for people to enjoy the right to water.
To help advance the discussion in the UN, Maude Barlow,
national chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of
the Blue Planet Project, was appointed in October, 2008, as the
first Senior Advisor on water issues for the 63rd session of the
General Assembly.
Freshwater in Ontario
Ontario
enjoys bountiful freshwater supply. We live amidst countless rivers
and streams, 250,000 freshwater lakes and, according to the Ministry
of the Environment, “fully one third of the Earth’s fresh water
within and along our borders”.
We cannot, however, be complacent.
To begin with, we must deal with the myth of abundance,
caused perhaps by the presence of the Great Lakes – the sweet-water
seas - lapping at the doorstep of so many of our cities.
Putting the myth into perspective, it is worth noting
that most of Canada’s freshwater does not even flow from the Great
Lakes to the St Lawrence. The flows into each of the Mackenzie and
Ungava bays equal the flow from the Great Lakes, while the flow
into Hudson Bay, with a watershed covering one third of Canada,
is more than twice that of the Great Lakes.
This is due in part to the fact that much of the
water in the Great Lakes is a reservoir left from the last ice age.
Lake Superior, the lake with the largest volume and that feeds its
four sisters, receives only about 1% of its volume as inflow each
year from its sources. A drier climate that reduces precipitation
or headwater flow into Lake Superior would reduce its level and
its outflow. Warmer winters that preclude the formation of ice would
result in increased evaporation, again reducing the level of and
the flow from the lake.
The examples above illustrate distinctions between
water income and water capital. Water income generally refers to
precipitation, while water capital refers to the freshwater in our
wetlands, groundwater, rivers, and lakes. Obviously, a society that
uses its water capital more quickly than it can be refreshed from
its income, or that reduces its water income through climate change,
will eventually deplete that capital.
A second reason to abandon complacency involves pollution.
As cited in an old African proverb, “Filthy water cannot be washed”,
so we pollute that precious tablespoon of freshwater that we have
at our peril.
Clearly, society has come a long way since it acted
as if the solution to pollution was dilution, the early days of
virtually unregulated industrial effluent, and since the extensive
eutrophication of Lake Erie in 1953 from excessive phosphorus.
Nonetheless, we continue to have communities with
inadequate waste water treatment and boil water advisories, restrictions
on the consumption of various fish stocks, poor-to-illegal waste
disposal practices, leaching landfills, and potential carcinogens
and endocrine disrupters in the food chain.
The Walkerton tragedy was a significant wake-up call
that has resulted in renewed initiatives on drinking water.
The province and the federal government, along with
their American counterparts and cities around the Great Lakes basin,
are shifting into a new gear to protect drinking water, and Ontario
in particular is sending signals on its desire to extend its approach
on drinking water source protection to a broader framework for watershed
management. At the same time, history may be coming full circle,
as Lake Simcoe has been identified as being severely stressed from,
among other things, too much phosphorus.
The Ontario Headwaters Institute applauds the province’s
emerging framework. We also think, however, that there is a need
for Ontarians to do a better job of preserving our headwaters: our
groundwater, aquifers, and the sources of our rivers and lakes.
The Importance of
Headwaters
While
some precipitation - our water income, as described in the previous
section – falls directly into our largest freshwater reservoirs,
most falls into the vast headwater areas of our watersheds.
As a result, preserving the integrity of these
headwaters is fundamental to the health of our ecosystems, and to
the availability of water for our health and well-being.
There are many world-wide examples of sound and poor
headwaters preservation.
On the positive side:
- In the western US, nearly all of the major waterways
and 75% of the water supply for people originates in National
Forests, an historic model of long-term planning;
- In the US north-east, New York City has sought
to protect its water far into the future through a watershed alliance
spanning two watersheds, 1,969 square miles, and 19 reservoirs.
The alliance involves the City, State, 7 counties, and 72 municipalities,
as well as regional environmentalists and farmers while both protecting
drink water and seeking to strengthen rural economies; and,
- Recently, Ontario created a 1.8 million acre Greenbelt,
purported to be the largest in the world. The Greenbelt is land-use
planning approach that addresses several regional challenges,
including the protection of forests, agricultural lands, the headwaters
for many Ontario rivers, and aquifers. Ontario is also pursuing
the development drinking water source protection planning, which
appears headed toward embracing broader watershed management issues
that may include additional headwaters protection.
On a more ominous note:
| The Aral Sea, 1973 - 2004 |
 |
- In central Asia, upstream diversion for irrigation
turned the taps against the Aral Sea, once the world’sfourth-largest
inland sea. Not only has the Aral dwindled into three small
lakes, these waters are polluted, local winds now pick up and
distribute salts from what used to be sea-bottom and, to add hubris
to ecological calamity, the cotton crops for which the irrigated
water was used have failed;
- There are reasoned concerns that the Ogallala
Aquifer, one of the world’s largest and which provides water to
8 states containing 27% of the irrigated land in the US, is being
pumped dry. Water levels have been falling steadily since the
1950’s, as recharge cannot keep pace with extraction. Costs to
pump ever-deeper water are escalating, while some project the
aquifer will run dry at current pumping rates by 2030; and,
- Around the worlds, cities are increasingly drawing
water from ever-greater distances, affecting the availability
of water for those regions. Key examples include Las Vegas and
Beijing, but cities in south-central Ontario that have until now
relied on groundwater may soon be seeking pipelines to bring water
from outside their natural watersheds to their residents.
The message is clear: we need to live within
both our watersheds and within our water income or we will upset
ecological norms at the same time as we march systematic toward
water shortages and drought.
Ontario’s Headwaters
Environment Canada recognizes the importance of headwaters
through, amongst other initiatives, research that suggests that
a healthy watershed is one that retains a minimum of 35% of its
area in natural cover and 10% in wetland – modest objectives for
rural watersheds that become difficult to maintain when faced with
extensive agriculture, water-intense industrial activity, or urbanization.
In Ontario, in spite of the significant loss of wetlands
and headwater streams in the urbanized swath north of Lake Ontario,
key headwater areas define much of the landscape. Picture for a
moment the imposing spine of the Niagara Escarpment and the rolling
beauty of the Oak Ridges Moraine. A bit further north lies the magnificent
canopy of the Algonquin Dome. The first of these contains the headwaters
of 8 Ontario watersheds, the second 20, and the third 7.
As
clear a path as these waterways carve,
headwater areas also feed a complex labyrinth of underground streams
and aquifers. In addition to re-emerging elsewhere to feed springs
and creeks, this groundwater performs an important function for
Ontario communities not drawing their water from surface sources.
As captured by Justice Dennis O'Connor in Part Two of his Report
of the Walkerton Enquiry,"Confined aquifers are the preferred
sources of drinking water, because
slow filtration through the aquitard helps to purge the groundwater
of potential pathogens."
In addition to the Niagara Escarpment, Oak Ridges
Moraine, and the Algonquin Dome, consider for a moment of the sprawling
boreal and taiga of Ontario’s north. Canada, with 1.9% of the world’s
land mass, receives about 6.5% of the world’s precipitation. While
our population is concentrated in the south, most of the precipitation
falls in the north, which of course has relatively little soil,
thanks to successive ice ages. Ontario’s north is, therefore, is
a huge headwater area of forests, muskeg, rivers, and lakes, flowing
to the arctic.
While it may look daunting and invulnerable, dams
can alter local ecosystems and impact the seasonal flow of freshwater
to the arctic, human activity can release pollutants to a fragile
ecosystem with fewer of the natural buffers than are found in the
south, and of course a hotter climate could devastate northern forests
that both filter water and sequester carbon.
As custodians of so much of the world’s water, Canadians
and Ontarians cannot be responsible stewards of water without preserving
our headwaters.
Preserving Ontario’s Headwaters
Currently, much of our regulatory and stewardship
approach to water focuses on water capital and is just starting
to move upstream. Key initiatives focus of the Great Lakes Water
Quality Agreement, storm- and waste water management, local appeals
to conservation buttressed by increased costs for municipal water,
the world-class land-use planning effort on the 1.8 million acre
Greenbelt mentioned above, and source protection planning and other
safeguards aimed at drinking water. In addition, the Provincial
Policy Statement offers protection for wetlands, although primarily
for “provincially significant” wetlands rather than for wetlands
in general.
The
importance of a strategic and comprehensive approach to headwaters
preservation is, however,
clearly emerging, from a number of directions. For example, Ontario
has been pursuing groundwater surveys across the province for a
number of years and is developing low water response plans driven
by the realities of rivers and large wetlands running dry in recent
years. There are also two moratoria in place that have headwater
implications: one against inter-basin water transfers and another
against new permits to take water.
More importantly, coming out of the Walkerton tragedy,
the Clean Water Act (2005) has resulted in many new initiatives
that clearly centre on drinking water but which include provisions
to be expanded to ecosystem-focused, watershed-based planning. For
example, a pre-Walkerton federal-provincial inventory of Ontario’s
water quantity has been transitioned into a task upon conservation
authorities to develop water budgets for each of their watersheds.
Other programs being considered can be seen in Watershed-based
Source Protection Planning, a report from a committee of technical
experts that guided the development of the Act and which can be
accessed from the Library page of this website.
While the provincial government seeks to
codify how to protect headwaters in regulation and implementation,
the OHI will both comment on agency plans and seek ways to involve
all segments of society in headwaters preservation through research,
education, and best practices.
Broad areas for future efforts may include:
- Contributing to consistent technical definitions
of headwaters, be they first order streams, wetlands, groundwater,
and aquifers;
- Identifying ways to distinguish and balance ecological
needs against human demand – ie: living off water income and not
draining water capital;
- Extending key aspects of the source water protection
regime to full watersheds;
- Preserving and/or restoring wetlands drained for
agricultural, municipal, or industrial purposes; and,
- Identifying the implications of and strategies
to address alterations to the hydrological regime in a changing
climate.
The OHI believes that we all need to help preserve
our headwaters for our children, the health of Ontario’s diverse
ecosystems, and a sustainable future.
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