Action Alert: Rivers need water too

January 8, 2025

Alberta Wilderness Association (AWA) is concerned about how the Alberta government discusses water, especially as one crucial component is repeatedly absent: the needs of the environment. This is demonstrated in the following government quotes:

“Under your leadership as Minister of Environment and Protected Areas, I expect you to deliver on several key priorities… These include reviewing Alberta’s water management strategy to increase the availability of water and water licences to Alberta municipalities, businesses and agricultural producers while maintaining the highest standards of water conservation and treatment.” – Premier Danielle Smith to Minister Rebecca Schulz

“The department is already taking action to maximize Alberta’s water supply, reduce the impacts of drought, support businesses and communities, and make every drop count.” – Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas

“Alberta is in a great position. We sit at the foot of the headwaters and we have the ability to sit down and work and build a strategy to be able to store more water, build more dams and provide that stability for the future. “– RJ Sigurdson, Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation

To discuss water use priorities without considering aquatic ecosystems is baffling, frustrating, and frankly irresponsible. The government wants to increase the availability of water, maximize the supply, and make every drop count for more economic use, all while failing to recognize that without healthy, robust watersheds, there would cease to be water for the economy at all.

The province’s only solution to increase water availability is to do what they have always done — build more dams and reservoirs, which fragments watersheds and ecological connectivity in the process. It’s not clear to AWA how adding more dams to the almost 1,500 province-wide could solve this. The government also doesn’t seem to be concerned that rivers don’t stop at our borders, or how water use in Alberta has consequences downstream. Saskatchewan, Manitoba, the Northwest Territories, and the United States will seemingly have to figure it out themselves.

In reality, securing, restoring, and preserving healthy, interconnected watersheds, and the innumerable benefits they provide for generations to come, is not possible if we remain committed to this status quo. Some water must be left in our rivers to meet the needs of aquatic ecosystems.

Until Jan. 24, the government is conducting public “water availability engagement” where they’re inviting Albertans to “share input on ways to increase water availability and improve the water management system in Alberta.” Typically, we would ask AWA members to complete the survey, but even the “brief” version of this survey is astonishingly long and unnecessarily complex.

Instead, we encourage you to email Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas at epa.water@gov.ab.ca with the following recommendations:

Instream flow needs (IFNs) of rivers must be prioritized to ensure their long-term viability.
Aquatic ecosystems and associated habitats, including but not limited to rivers, streams, wetlands, riparian areas, floodplains, and headwater forests, must be rapidly protected and restored.
Natural processes that store, filter, and slow water on the landscape must be rapidly protected and restored to increase water security and resilience against floods, fires, and drought.
Restoration methods that work with, rather than against, aquatic ecosystems and natural processes must be prioritized. This includes re-meandering streams, reopening channels, replacing culverts with fish-friendly infrastructure, reintroducing beavers, re-stablishing native vegetation and habitat features, removing dams and other in-stream barriers, etc.
Existing water conservation objects cannot be removed from current licensee requirements.
Water licenses must be periodically reviewed and updated to ensure they reflect the current and future realities of the watershed in which they exist. How and what water is used for in each basin should be consistent with the ecological constraints of the region.
Water conservation objectives (WCOs) must be established for all basins and applied to all licenses. Existing WCOs must be strengthened to better reflect evidence-based IFNs. This requires that the government create standardized processes to develop, review, and update WCOs, as recommended by the Auditor General.
Water managers should prioritize meeting WCOs when making decisions to license and allocate water.
Water Management Plans must be developed, approved, and implemented for all major basins in the province.
All recommendations from the Auditor General’s report on Surface Water Management must be implemented.
The Water Act must be amended to remove the First In Time, First In Right (FITFIR) principle, where the oldest water licenses get their full allocation before all other users. FITFIR should be replaced with a principle that prioritizes the protection of the environment and human health first.
Mechanisms must be created to address overallocated basins like the South Saskatchewan River, where allocations to water licensees exceed sustainable thresholds. As one of the few tools available currently within the Water Act to address this issue, the 10 % holdback of allocations for the environment that can occur during water transfers should be mandatory, and the percentage held back increased.
Setting mandatory standards on the water efficiency of appliances, technologies, and infrastructure can prevent wasteful, inefficient systems being grandfathered in.
Due to the extreme risk they pose to the environment and downstream users, inter-basin water transfers must be prohibited. Diverting the flow of distant water sources and risking their ecological integrity should not be the answer to water scarcity caused by mismanagement and overconsumption in another region. Alberta, and particularly Southern Alberta must live and plan within its own means and ecological restraints.

This list isn’t exhaustive, so please feel free to add your own. These are just a few things that would go a long way to strengthen and support Alberta watersheds. We need to emphasize to government that working against the environment simply doesn’t work.