Water Security

In 2008, the Canadian Water Network (CWN) awarded UBC’s Program on Water Governance (PoWG) a four-year grant to lead a team of researchers from 8 Canadian universities, and 20 project partners from across Canada, on a project to improve water security in Canada.

Water security is emerging as a paradigm for cumulative impacts assessment and watershed management, and is a topic of great interest in Canada and world-wide. PoWG defines water security as “sustainable access on a watershed basis, to adequate quantities of water of acceptable quality, to ensure human and ecosystem health”. The World Economic Forum recently described water security as “the gossamer that links together the web of food, energy, climate, economic growth and human security challenges that the world faces over the next two decades”.

The overall objective of the project is to create a Water Security Assessment Framework (WSAF) to improve water security in Canada by improving governance for source protection and land use. The WSAF will be a ‘toolkit’ composed of Water Security Status Indicators (WSSI), and associated decision-support tools. The WSAF will be user-friendly and use data already available to many communities. It will include aquatic ecosystem health, human health (including water quality and quantity) and governance capacity. It will differ from other similar frameworks in its:

1. comprehensiveness and integration (e.g. incorporation of governance variables)
2. sensitivity to spatial variation (in some tools) and
3. inclusion of decision-support tools

The WSAF is being developed in two case study communities, the Grand River Conservation Authority, Ontario and the Township of Langley, BC. The team has made knowledge translation a key priority to ensure that the research benefits water managers, policy makers and community watershed groups. We have introduced the concept of water security to a broad public audience through the publication Water Security: A Primer (2010). This will be followed by the Water Security Manual, which will be published in 2012.

For the latest project summary, please read our Water Security Briefing Note released February 2011, or view our latest conference poster. More project publications are available here.

Project status:
This project is ongoing
For more information about this program, please contact:
Water Security Project