Water Un-frastructure

The most immediately compelling argument we have in support of water policy reform in Canada is what hydrologists describe as the loss of hydrological stationarity. While few outside the fields of hydrology and climatology presently understand the meaning of stationarity, it won’t be long before the term enters public consciousness and everyday vocabulary around the world. The reason: the loss of hydrological stationarity means that our world is changing–and in some places it is changing faster than anyone expected and in ways that many do not desire.

We have disrupted the energy economy of the atmosphere in ways that we are now turbo-charging the hydrological cycle. There is more juice going through our infrastructure than it can handle without inevitable damage to the system itself and to bystanders like ourselves. The impact of the energized water cycle is already been felt in our cities. Take Toronto, for example, which has experienced four 1-in-100-year extreme weather events in the past twenty years. One storm, in 2005, caused half a billion dollars of damage to water infrastructure in only two hours.

We have discovered that water, energy, and climate are linked. This realization suggests that head-turning economic benefits can accrue to governments and the people they serve by way of water conservation. Because we have believed the myth of limitless abundance, we have accepted and encouraged wasteful water use as a social norm. We have, at enormous public cost, overbuilt water infrastructure to support that wasteful norm. Now we find we cannot afford to maintain and replace the overbuilt infrastructure that supports that waste, which increases the risk of public health disasters like Walkerton.

We have also discovered that we waste enormous amounts of energy treating and moving water to where it can be wasted. The cost of this energy is now rising and we are discovering we can’t afford to spend up to 60 per cent of municipal energy budgets to move water to where it is being used profligately. In addition, we have realized that the energy we are wasting by wasting water is accelerating climate change which is starting to pound the hell out of the infrastructure we can’t afford to maintain and replace. The huge impacts extreme weather events are having on our cities have not gone unnoticed by the insurance industry. In November of 2011, the Insurance Bureau of Canada announced that insurance rates are going to start rising in areas that do not score well in terms of the age and state of their infrastructure, and that in cases where infrastructure is inadequate or inadequately maintained insurance will no longer be available. (Read about water-related insurance claims in “Damage Control” from Water Canada’s March/April 2011 issue.)

We have, unwittingly, created a positive climate change feedback–an obvious vicious circle–that is simultaneously bankrupting us while compounding climate change effects. This cycle will accelerate until we stop wasting water and the energy it takes to move it to where we waste it. There is, however, a silver lining in this. Every Canadian can share in the head-turning economic benefits of breaking this cycle. Industry example suggests that for every dollar you save in water use you can save as much as four dollars more on chemical, electricity and energy costs. In terms of adaptation to climate effects we can literally save ourselves by saving water. But to do so, we have to advance water policy reform in this direction now.

Bob Sandford is the EPCOR Chair of the Canadian Partnership Initiative in support of the United Nations Water for Life Decade and a member of Canada’s national Forum for Leadership on Water. Sandford was also recently named senior global water policy advisor to the Interaction Council. He recently published Ethical Water: Learning to Value What Matters Most in collaboration with Merrell-Ann Phare. This op-ed is part of an ongoing series exclusive to watercanada.net.