A new report from researchers at the University of Saskatchewan states that Canada can be a leader in helping to achieve water sustainability, although they say the country is falling short of goals set out by United Nations.
The report “Water Futures for the World We Want” takes aim at areas where the country is lacking in water resource management.
Corrine Schuster-Wallace, a USask Professor says Canada has shown its commitment to addressing climate change, although she says the goals set out by the UN focus are on a larger scale. Schuster-Wallace says they focus on poverty, health and social development to name a few.
She adds Canada has a unique opportunity with the interplay between water and snow. With that, Schuster-Wallace says as a country, we can share our solutions with the world but before then, Canada Canada has to transform how it observes, predicts and manages water to meet the goals.
Schuster-Wallace says we need to more closely look at how we’re using water and what’s sustainable in terms of the uses and amount of water that we can take out of a watershed. She points to the majority of our population lives in the south and that most of out rivers flow north.
Other examples of shortcomings are inadequate access to clean drinking water on First Nations, even when drinking water advisories have been eliminated; lack of wastewater treatment in parts of the country and declining water quality in waterbodies across the country.
The full report can be found by clicking on the link below.
https://gwf.usask.ca/sdgreport/index.php#ExecutiveSummary