Canada’s Dry: “We’re in a new game here”

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings: You no doubt, remember last year’s forest fire season, it would be impossible to forget. But did you know that some of those fires, which in your experience are months in the past, are still burning right now? They are smouldering under brush and leaves hibernating is perhaps one way to put it. They are just waiting for conditions to be warm enough and dry enough to spring back to life. And I got some bad news about that.

CLIP: John Pomeroy So it’s a vast, vast area of Canada that is in great peril in 2024 for extreme ideological droughts, something unprecedented In modern times,

Jordan: There is not enough snow, there is not enough water, not enough of what we would consider a normal healthy winter. And that means, as you might imagine, a bad fire season to come, but not just a bad fire season. It means a bad growing season. It means farmers making tough decisions about which crops to save and which to let die. It means livestock calls and water restrictions. It means for some communities already questions about what to do when the water runs out. These are not questions we are used to asking in this country, especially not in the middle of winter, but they are questions. We are going to be asking more winters than not from now on. So Canada’s dry, our world is changing. Here is what that means for all of us. I’m Jordan Heath Rowlings. This is The Big Story. John Pomeroy is a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Saskatchewan. He is a Canada research chair in water resources and climate change. Hi John.

John Pomeroy: Hello.

Jordan: Thanks for finding some time for us today.

John Pomeroy: Pleasure to speak to you.

Jordan: I wanted to begin because this is where it dawned on me how serious this was by asking you about McBride British Columbia. Are you aware of what’s been happening there?

John Pomeroy: Yes. Yeah, McBride is really almost a canary in the coal mine for the Canadian Rockies. It’s been running out of water and they’ve been looking at alternative water supplies and this is surprising for a Canadian Rockies community. We think of the Rockies as the water towers for Western and northern Canada and here have a small town there that’s running out and it’s because the glaciers that once fed the creek that supply water to it have receded so much that they’re no longer contributing stream flow in the summer. And because of very low snow packs last year and early snow melt and then extreme drought and all this came together and put McBride in a terrible situation, and I’m sure we’ll see many other communities in that situation as time progresses,

Jordan: If it’s the canary in the coal mine, how normalized could it become that communities that we just simply assume would have a healthy amount of water are struggling?

John Pomeroy: Yes. Well, Calgary Alberta had voluntary water restrictions last summer because the flows on the Bow River were in the summertime and fall the lowest ever recorded. And that’s because of declining glacier contributions to the Bow River, but also a low snow pack that melted about a month early and then fairly dry weather after that in extreme heat. So that’s what the late 21st century looks like. And Calgary this year is very, very worried and talking about mandatory water restrictions and Alberta itself going to stage five drought as a highly likely scenario for 2024.

Jordan: In the big picture then, since we’re talking about Alberta and Calgary and possibly the rest of the prairies, what kinds of dryness have we seen across Canada as summer has turned into fall and winter?

John Pomeroy: Yeah, it’s rather interesting across Canada. The drought extends from British Columbia to Labrador and from the US border up into the Northwest territories. So its extent is unprecedented and its severity in parts of southern British Columbia, Southern Alberta and Saskatchewan is also unprecedented. That was through the summer and fall. And then moving into early winter, we had the first part of winter without a snow pack at all, which is exceedingly rare for the prairies for southern BC and for much of the rest of central Canada. And that along with very low soil moisture levels, reservoirs that have been depleted already and are some cases five meters below normal levels, groundwater that’s been depleted. It puts us in a precarious situation now that I’m speaking in mid-January. The snow ax in British Columbia are one half of where they should be at this time of year and very similar conditions on the eastern slopes of the Rockies in Alberta. These are the water towers that supply the rivers that flow into bc, the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. So it’s a vast, vast area of Canada that is in great peril in 2024 for extreme hydrological droughts, something unprecedented in modern times.

Jordan: How do we quantify how dry a part of the country is? What qualifies as a drought? I’m trying to give our listeners a sense of, I guess how much water is missing or how far away these places are from having a healthy balance.

John Pomeroy: Yes, we talk about different types of drought. There is a meteorological drought which will be lack of precipitation and sometimes indices include the excessive heat, which often accompanies drought. And so that’s been very extreme over parts of Western Canada and through the Boreal forest. But then when we talk about agriculture, we’re usually looking at soil moisture and that causes agricultural droughts. And so for instance, in parts of the prairies, soil moisture levels are less than 40% of where they should be at this time of year. And then there’s hydrological drought, which is the flow in the major rivers, the levels of lakes and things like that. Hydrological drought takes longer to form, but it also takes longer to come out of. And that has been record across BC and Alberta and Saskatchewan this year in 2023, lake Diefenbaker, which supplies 70% of Saskatchewan with water received only 28% of its normal inflows from Alberta. And that’s due to the drought and the mountains and planes in Alberta and the heavy irrigation there. And then the wildfires, which covered Canada record amounts in many parts of the country were again caused by the drought. So a drought in the northern forest turns into a wildfire season, right? So drought manifests itself differently depending on how we’re looking at it and what the impacts are.

Jordan: Have these unprecedented levels of drought as you just put it, been receiving enough attention in the media and otherwise considering the danger they might represent.

John Pomeroy: We’ve been looking at this drought like the blind men and the elephant in the Indian legend. We have been talking about the wildfires or the poor harvest or the low flows of Calgary or BC towns and villages with water restrictions, but we haven’t put it together that these are all manifestations of the same thing. The hottest year in human history in 20 23, 1 of the hottest years in Canadian history, depending where you are in the country, that year we had temperatures of 38 degrees in the northwest territories and then the early snow melts the lack of rain. This was a year that was not only a drought, but it was a year that very closely followed the worst case climate projections for around the year 2100. So this gives us a taste of what climate change might bring to Canada if we don’t get greenhouse gas concentrations reduced very, very quickly. And so it’s a wake up call as well, but it also has challenged our water management systems across the country, the low flows crossing provincial boundaries and territorial boundaries. The challenges in managing Alberta had to suspend water for its irrigation districts for the first time ever at the end of the summer. It affects food security, energy security, Manitoba hydro BC hydro having terrible years with insufficient stream flow to generate hydroelectricity and keep their reservoirs full. The inadequacy of the Columbia River Treaty, which has allowed the Aero Lakes and British Columbia to go to very, very low levels while supplying the Americans according to the terms of the treaty. All these other things need to be looked at and it shows us we need to look at our boundary apportionments, transboundary apportionments, and we need to manage water differently in this country according to river basins what’s called the Integrated River basin Management. Instead of the piecemeal approach we make right now province by province with a very fragmented federal engagement in the whole process and also a process that has so far left indigenous communities and first nations off the table.

Jordan: I think most people listening to this or just most Canadians in general would consider Canada an extremely water rich nation. I mean, we’ve even joked on this podcast before about America eventually coming for our water. Do we understand that correctly? And how much danger do these conditions put our simple not even thinking about it, access to potable water in

John Pomeroy: Yes, you could look at a map of Canada and you see lots of lakes and sure enough, Canada stores 20% of the world’s fresh water in its lakes, but the flow of water down Canadian rivers is not particularly high and those rivers tend to flow northward up into the Arctic. So where we have excess water is where we do not have our populations, our big populations in the south and the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence in the southern prairies and southern valleys of British Columbia, many of these areas are semi-arid to sub Hewitt, particularly in the West. And the Great Lakes have been reliable so far, but the lakes store lots of water without necessarily having the inflows of water that would’ve been needed for high use. And the Great Lakes were also threatened. The snow packs in the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Basin have been declining precipitously in the last few decades. The warming of the lakes, the lack of ice cover is increasing evaporation. It was just 20 years ago we had serious water problems with low water levels and we can expect those again in the future. So even the great Lake, St. Lawrence is not necessarily secure. And remember, our food security comes largely from the western prairie agriculture and that has been seriously impacted by drought in 2023. This can topple and disable our governments. The government of the Northwest territories had to evacuate the territory due to wildfire. Great Slave Lake is at its lowest level ever recorded and the records go back to the 1930s. Saskatchewan went from a budget surplus to a budget deficit situation because of payouts for crops and wildfire and Alberta, a billion dollars off its surplus for similar regions. So these are impoverishing us as well as destabilizing our governments.

Jordan: You’ve mentioned it a couple times and it’s a term that maybe not everybody understands or certainly doesn’t understand its relationship to the situation we’re in now. What is snowpack? Why is it so important to what we’re discussing here?

John Pomeroy: Well, the seasonal snowpack in Canada provides about three quarters of our stream flow. When that melts and soaks into the ground, it comes out for many, many months in the spring and summer and keeps our rivers flowing, replenishes our lakes and wetlands and our groundwater and the snow packs and snowfall have been declining in many parts of Canada and the southern parts. They’ve been increasing in northern parts of Canada, but there’s a very low population there and those rivers flow north, so that’s not helping us where we need the water. And this has created challenges for prairie agriculture. It created the challenges for the town of McBride. The glaciers retreated there because of reduced snowpack in the mountains and then the reduced snowpack itself reduced stream flows so that McBride started running out of water. There’s other communities in this situation, Cumberland House indigenous community in the Saskatchewan River, Delta downstream of the Rockies has had such low water levels this year they’ve been digging a well to get through the winter and that’s been settled since the 1770s, that community and they’ve never had this problem before. So many other BC communities have been short of water and have had to impose severe drought restrictions to get through the summer. And this is because of low snow backs, early snow melt, lack of snow. So when we don’t have that snow, which is very reliable, snow melts in the spring, we can monitor it and measure it over the winter and we know we’re going to get in the summer when we don’t have that. We’re dependent upon the rainfall, which tends to be spotty, pretty variable in terms of where it falls. Often it comes too much too quickly and causes a flood and it’s very, very hard to predict. So that’s a very different situation for Canada and given that most of our economy is water dependent and therefore snowfall dependent, it puts our whole economic prosperity as well as our natural ecosystems at risk.

Jordan: I want to get into what this means in terms of what Canadians will actually experience in 2024, and obviously there are a few ways in which this will manifest. Let’s start first of all because you’ve spoken about how important our agriculture supply from the prairies is. What do we know now about the current situation and what the summer and harvest will look like?

John Pomeroy: Vast Foss, the prairies are in extreme drought and almost all the prairies are abnormally dry to moderate drought or worse, and that’s a situation entry in the winter. What’s followed though is the winter snowpack has not developed in any normal way. Saskatoon, for instance, received only rainfall in December. For the first time in its history, Regina had no precipitation at all. And so the prairies were snow free. Well into January, they have a little bit of snow now it translates to about eight millimeters of water equivalent, which would evaporate in one good day of crop growth in the summer. So it’s insignificant. That puts the prairies at tremendous risk of drought in the spring, particularly with an El Nino, which generally brings warmer weather to Western Canada and sometimes drier weather. And so there’s still time for some storms to come through there and maybe we’ll get a rainy summer, but it doesn’t look like that. And certainly environment Canada’s medium term and longer term forecasts are suggesting warmer than normal conditions over that region and often drier than normal conditions. So that’s one to pay attention to because soil moisture reserves are exhausted in the region. The reservoirs are at record low levels, and so the areas which irrigate, which is small but economically important, may undergo restrictions next year for the first time in the history of irrigation in Western Canada.

Jordan: I think I know the answer to the next aspect I will ask about, but I’d like you to kind of explain what we might see and how problems might compound themselves year over year. But assuming no miraculous storms come through, what can we expect these drought conditions to do for wildfires in 24 compared to last year, which was already unprecedented?

John Pomeroy: Yes. Last year the wildfire season started with a low snowpack that melted early and we have snow packs building up in the boreal forests throughout Canada that are lower than they were last year at this time. And so with the warm forecast, which would cause early snow melt, we could start off with potentially a worse fire season than we had last year. Also, there are many fires still burning in the north, they’re burning under the snow and they’re waiting for that snow to melt and the heat to come back to flare up again. So we know they’re there. The smoke is evident in many places and they’re just waiting to flare up and for this heat to return and it looks highly likely that it will.

Jordan: I ask this question a lot when it comes to climate related unprecedented times, and I know that El Nino is out there now at least in part impacting this, but in general, are these kind of winters leading to these kind of conditions going to become our new normal? And if so, you mentioned there are still wildfires burning from last year. How does it compound year over year?

John Pomeroy: Yes. One thing important to realize is this drought started before El Yeo started. We were in a la yya phase at the time, which should have been wetter and cooler, and then we had unprecedented dry conditions and heat instead. So that’s showing that the systems have decoupled from El Yya la Yya to some degree. We’re seeing the overriding influence of climate warming on the signals and extremely warm sea temperatures influencing the coasts and precipitation patterns across the country. So we’re in a new game here and it’s looking much more variable than the climate that we are used to in Canada and that we have developed our agriculture and our water management for. And it also looks that we can have severe droughts and heat waves even without an El Nino that would probably just be exacerbated by those when they come. So there’s lots to worry about in 2024, many scientists have predicted it could be even hotter than 2023 and become the hottest year in human recent history.

Jordan: I feel like that’s just a given now from one year to the next.

John Pomeroy: Yeah, 2022 was the hottest year, and then 2023 and then 2024. So if you’re betting it’s a good bet that this carries on. And of course our greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase. If you look at the slope of the increase in CO three, the atmosphere, it’s not slowing down at all despite all the talk and the agreements. So there’s no reason for this to slow down whatsoever. And there’s a risk that it can be accelerating

Jordan: Aside, obviously from taking the scale of the climate emergency seriously globally and nationally, more practically, what could we be doing given what we already know to prepare for another incredibly dry year in these affected areas?

John Pomeroy: Yes, there’s lots we can do. Canadians have been very active water managers. We have lots of reservoirs and dams around the country, particularly farmers are incredibly innovative and adaptive in how they cope with things. So we need to store water now where we can, and that means taking a hit on hydroelectricity generation, but we need to store that water to supplement stream flow in the spring and summer should our snow packs remain low, which looks likely at this point. Farmers need to adopt careful management practices, choosing crops that use less water, and they generally have a selection. And there’s a few in there that are more drought tolerant, and that means picking those irrigators have to prepare for the eventuality that they may not get the full irrigation allotment that they would need. And so again, that means making sure they’re irrigating high value crops that are worth it and not the lower value. And the livestock producers are already calling their herds and reducing their herds because of lack of grazing in feed, and unfortunately they probably need to continue to do that to remain viable. And then finally, our interprovincial agreements are very modest agreements, very light agreements, and I’m not certain that they will be up for the water management challenges we will have in 2024, and I think they need to be revisited. We have a brand new Canada Water Agency at the federal level, and we needed to become active to help the provinces to manage this water and to assure equitable sharing of water for various uses in and between provinces, deal with the American border, which most of Canadian water is transboundary with the US as you mentioned. That’s one that needs to be looked at very carefully. And also to ensure that our first nations and indigenous communities are getting their fair share of water. They have fared very poorly in allocations and in water quality, and that needs to be improved so we can do much better, and I think we have the knowledge and the capacity there, but we need things like a national flood and drought forecasting system. We don’t have one, we’re the only G seven country. Without that, these things need to be implemented, made fully public to allow people to prepare and plan for the challenges that we have. Ahead

Jordan: Of all that stuff that you just listed, what percentage of it would you estimate is actively being tackled?

John Pomeroy: The Canada Water Agency bill is before Parliament, and the agency has been stood up as part of Environment Canada, so that’s great. There’s another bill before Parliament to establish a national drought and flood forecasting service at the federal level, cooperatively with the provinces. It’s a private member’s bill, but I hope something like that passes. The provinces such as Alberta have taken this very, very seriously and have an all hands on deck approach to ensuring that water is managed appropriately and British Columbia is also preparing its drought plans for the next year. So I think it is being taken seriously, but we still have a ways to go. The National Wildfire Fighting Service has not been created yet, and we could have a worse wildfire year coming up than we had last year and last year just exhausted our resources. We relied on help with wildfire fighters from around the world. We can’t deal with that every year. We can’t call in the military every time we have a drought or a wildfire or flood. We have to be able to manage these in a more prepared way and have the capacity there provincially and federally and locally to deal with these extreme disasters because we’re going to be seeing them on a regular basis.

Jordan: John, thank you so much for this. I wish it was better news, but I’m glad to be able to understand the scope of what’s going on right now. Thanks again.

John Pomeroy: Thank you.

Jordan: John Pomeroy hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan. That was The Big Story for more, including lots of other depressing climate news. You can head to The Big Story podcast.ca. You can always ask us questions or offer us feedback via email. Hello at The Big Story podcast.ca. Is that address or you can call and leave us a voicemail, nine three five five nine three five is that phone number, the big stories and all your favourite podcast players and on your smart speakers if you ask them to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rowlings. We’ll talk to tomorrow.