Good morning. There’s drought but also hope in B.C. and Alberta – more on that below, along with the end of the Paris Olympics and Joe Biden’s first campaign appearance since dropping out. But first:
Today’s headlines
- There are no plans to share Canada’s mpox vaccines with Africa despite a new outbreak, federal agency says
- Israel broadens its evacuation orders after a deadly strike on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza
- Zelensky says Ukraine’s shock attack in Kursk is meant to pressure Russia and ‘restore justice’
A look at Merritt, B.C.Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
Climate
Into the dry lands
The mayor of Merritt, B.C., Michael Goetz, knows that his city’s supply of fresh water is getting dangerously low. Already, he’s introduced measures to reduce water pressure and urged residents to limit how much they consume. But Goetz’s real stress comes from not being able to pinpoint just when the water might run out. Merritt gets its groundwater from natural aquifers – porous rocks or sediments that the rain soaks through – and three straight years of drought means those aquifers aren’t refilling as fast as they used to. How dry are they? Hard to say; the cost of underground surveying is too high. “Honestly, nobody really knows what’s down there,” Goetz told The Globe’s Justine Hunter on a recent tour of Merritt’s water systems.
Based in Victoria, Hunter has written extensively on the climate, and in her new report, she investigates the perilous state of freshwater supply across Western Canada. Even before summer’s arrival, close to 20 per cent of B.C. faced extreme or exceptional levels of drought. Average snowpack was at an all-time low. Rivers in the Interior were running narrower and shallower than they did in the spring of 2023, which went on to be among B.C.’s driest years on record. “Meanwhile, the drought shaping up this summer is pushing the ‘wet coast’ of B.C., and Alberta, into uncharted territory,” Hunter writes. And the systems in place to manage water responsibly haven’t caught up to the climate crisis yet.
A sudden shift
The effect of climate change is particularly stark in northern Alberta’s Peace-Athabasca Delta. For the past two-and-a-half centuries, this complex ecosystem of rivers, marshes, channels and lakes enjoyed unusually abundant water – it remains one of the largest inland freshwater deltas in the world. But receding glaciers and shrinking snowpack are reducing the river flow out of the central Rockies. In May, the threat of wildfires from bone-dry conditions forced 4,700 people to evacuate the Peace River community of Fort Nelson. A month later, B.C. officials warned that drought in the Peace had reached deep in the soil.
Firefighters work the Parker Lake wildfire in Fort Nelson last May.HO/The Canadian Press
A full 13 years ago, in a paper on the Peace-Athabasca Delta, Canadian professors Brent Wolfe and Roland Hall warned that we needed to get ready for water shortages on a scale we’ve not seen or even recorded before. Drought, when it comes, can come alarmingly fast: “The transition from water abundance to scarcity can occur within a generation,” Hall said, “allowing little time for society to adapt.”
Meter by meter
So: yikes. Yikes! It’s clear that our current system of groundwater management isn’t cutting it. More than one-third of the 136 wells that B.C. sampled showed below-normal levels in June, but the province doesn’t actually track how much water is being used. “It’s treated like an all-you-can-eat-buffet,” Raincoast Conservation Foundation biologist Auston Chhor told The Globe’s Hunter. “And the solution to that is to introduce universal water metering across the board.”
Merritt’s Mayor Goetz is also bullish on this approach, which he recognizes is unpopular but sees as vital for sustainability: “No water, no sewer, no town,” he said. Putting a price on water has proven to temper demand. In 1994, California’s early-meter-adopter Pajaro Valley raised rates in one of its water zones by 21 per cent; five years later, customer use had dropped by 22 per cent.
But ecologists and planners in search of new tools should probably look to an old Canadian pal. Beavers help create and maintain wetlands with their meticulously crafted dams, which trap rushing water and allow it to seep slowly into the ground. After they were nearly wiped out in North America for their pelts, beavers are now being reintroduced to areas like Kane Valley, south of Merritt. Over the past year, they’ve been furiously improving the replica dams built by biologist Tom Willms and his Nicola Valley Institute of Technology students in 2021.
As a result of their efforts, Howarth Creek has widened and its flow has slowed. Rainbow trout returned and sedge meadows flourish along the riverbanks. More groundwater has refilled Merritt’s natural aquifers. And the BC Wildlife Federation plans to follow Willms’s lead, building 100 artificial aquascapes across the province in the next three years. They’ve realized that long-term water restoration depends on giving a dam.
Paris 2024
That’s a wrap on the Summer Games
Au revoir, Paris.Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters
There were, fittingly, a whole bunch of athletic feats at the Olympics closing ceremony: Tom Cruise rappelled off the roof of the Stade de France, Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars surfed a Team USA crowd and mummy-wrapped acrobats on top of golden rings held their handstands for an astonishingly long time. (Also, on a beach in LA, Snoop Dogg crip walked.) This has been one of Canada’s best medal totals in Olympics history – you can see every one of those 27 winners here – and hundreds of Canadian athletes stuck around for the final show, led into the stadium by record-breaking flag bearers Summer McIntosh and Ethan Katzberg. Not quite ready to give up the Games? Catch anything you may have missed here.
The Week
What we’re following
Tomorrow: The sexual assault case of five former members of Canada’s world junior hockey team is due back in court to potentially set a date for trial. Last week, two of those members, Michael McLeod and Dillon Dubé, signed contracts to play in the Russian league.
Wednesday: On the heels of a wild week of market swings, the United States releases its inflation report.
Thursday: After a foiled terror attack in Vienna shut her concerts down, Taylor Swift kicks off a five-day run at Wembley Stadium in London. It’s the last leg of her Eras tour before Swift comes to Toronto in November and Vancouver in December.
Thursday: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will travel to Maryland for their first campaign appearance together since he dropped out of the U.S. presidential race.
Saturday: Hold on to your hats – the horses are running at the 165th King’s Plate, Canada’s oldest (and, it will have you know, most prestigious) thoroughbred horse race.