Thank you.
Good morning, Chair Ratansi, vice-chairs Findlay and Pauzé, and members of the committee. My name is Jay Famiglietti. I'm the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where I hold the Canada 150 Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. I'm also the lead organizer of today's Water Day on the Hill for which we brought 24 water scientists from 14 universities and seven different provinces to Ottawa to talk with you about our science, that is, the science of water.
We're here today to directly communicate our science to you because it's compelling and also because it's our responsibility to keep you informed and because we want you to know that we are here for you. When you need information on a certain water topic, please do not hesitate to reach out.
In my research, I use satellites and I develop computer models to track how freshwater availability is changing all over the world. The maps shown on the screen were produced by my team and our collaborators using a NASA satellite called GRACE, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. The GRACE mission, which flew from 2002 through 2017, behaved more like a scale than a typical satellite, which we might think of as a space-borne camera. Instead, GRACE literally weighed the regions of the world that were gaining water—shown in blue—and that were losing water—shown in red.
Broadly speaking, the map has a background pattern in which the high and low latitude regions of the world, the already wet regions, are getting wetter—shown by the light blue background colours—and the mid-latitude regions of the world in between, that is the already dry areas, are getting drier—shown by the lighter red and orange background colours. The map is then dotted with what I call “hot spots for water insecurity”. These are places where there is too much water—shown by the deeper blue spots—for example, due to flooding becoming more extreme, or places where there is too little water—shown by the deeper red spots—due to more pronounced draught or due to the over-exploitation of groundwater.
The map paints a picture of humans, then, as the driving force of a very rapidly changing freshwater landscape, for example, due to climate change, which is causing the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and Alpine glaciers, like those in Alaska and British Columbia, to melt, contributing to sea level rise and impacting the source of stream-flow in our rivers.
You can also see a number of deep red spots across the mid-latitudes of the world, including those in California, Texas, the Middle East, India, Bangladesh, Beijing and several more. These represent primarily the disappearance of groundwater from the world's major aquifers. In most regions around the world, the groundwater in these aquifers is being massively overpumped to provide irrigation water to fuel global food production. A profound lack of governance and management the world over allows this over-exploitation to continue largely unabated. The upshot of this map is that not only is our global water security at risk but so too is our global food security.
Canada is not immune to these issues. It, too, is less water-secure than is generally appreciated. Looking at the GRACE map, we can see the impact of melting ice across the Canadian west, the north and the northeast, and the cumulative impact of flooding across Alberta and western Saskatchewan. This is consistent with climate model predictions of how climate change will impact Canada through melting ice and permafrost, shorter snow seasons, and more liquid rain rather than snowfall in the mountains, all of which will lead to changes in the timing of stream-flow and freshwater availability for people, for agriculture and for the environment, and to greater oscillations between flooding and draught.
Except that it's already happening now, and it's happening at rates that are quicker than our models project. It's happening at rates that are so quick that we are unable to prepare for them. Canadian water scientists like me and my colleagues are working on continuing these observations and developing new ones, and we'll be talking with you about them today. We're thinking about their implications and about how best to prepare Canada for its more complicated water future and therefore its more complicated food and energy futures. We're thinking about things like integrated river basin planning, the need for national-scale flood, groundwater and water availability forecasting, and the need for new governance paradigms for global groundwater or for a Canada water agency that can circumvent the fractured nature of water management that is so common in developed countries and yet stands in the way of the urgent need to address the many issues that are becoming visible on this map.
I will close by saying that the rapid pace of change of our freshwater landscape certainly presents many challenges, but it also presents an opportunity to show how a nation such as Canada can lead the world towards managing the way through to sustainable national and global water futures.
Thank you.