That's even better. That's great.
Thank you very much for the invitation. It's interesting. I also listened to the first two presenters as well as David, so I'm pleased to follow them.
In the first slide, I have a picture that represents a landscape very familiar to John Barlow, whom I would particularly like to thank for the invitation. This is the iconic Foothills region near the Rocky Mountains in southern Alberta. This is the landscape that generates the primary water source for the rivers that flow across the Prairies.
In the next slide I have a summary, and this is the only data slide I will show you. This is called a hydrograph or a water graph. It represents the amount of water that's been flowing, in this case in the Waterton River, but it's pretty typical of the rivers that drain the Rocky Mountains. The darker plot, which is black if you have a coloured version, represents the conditions over the last century. The red plot represents the anticipated conditions into the next century.
You will see there is likely to be a gradual decline. Even though we're getting more rain, we're getting more drying from evaporation, but most critically, we have reduced flows late in the summer, in July but especially in August and September. Also on this plot I have the green dash line, which represents crop water use, in this case for potatoes. We have a temporal problem in that we have abundant water in the spring, but demand for water for irrigation and other uses happens later in the summer.
The obvious strategy to deal with this situation is to impose dams to create reservoirs to store and subsequently release the water. This has been done, and it involves pretty much all the streams in the South Saskatchewan River basin, with the water from southern Alberta as well as northern Montana that flows to Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
The problem with this approach is shown in the next slide. This is a photograph of the river valley in Lethbridge in July, when typically there would be high flows. You can literally walk across and not get your gumboots wet. As indicated in the plot in the lower left corner, we have a damming and diversion of the vast majority of the flow.
A challenge we face relative to climate change is that we've already pretty well fully allocated our river systems in the western prairies, but unfortunately things are becoming drier because things are becoming warmer.
The first problem relative to this in terms of irrigation is that agriculture relates to water quantity, and in particular to sufficient water quantity to allow for the existing commitments, and this will limit further expansion.
The other problem follows, because as we lose the water in the river, any contaminants, whether from agricultural, industrial, or municipal sources, become more concentrated. We have this interaction between declining water quantity and degrading water quality. Both are likely to increase with climate change.
Over the past month or so I have asked people who know more than I do about policies and practices what they think might be done to prepare Canada for this future. I will briefly describe five points relative to what the federal government might do.
The first point was raised by an individual from Alberta Innovates. His suggestion relates to a number of federal government programs referred to as clean technology programs. These are primarily aimed at oil and gas and energy, but many of the principles would also apply to agriculture. Thus, there should be a widening of the eligibility for this group of programs.
This next opportunity is perhaps the one that was most commonly suggested. It suggests that for agricultural research, as we try to cope with the compound problems of increasing population globally and climate change, we match the research program that is common in biomedicine.
In the medical field, we have a cluster of research programs that support basic research, cell biology, and genetics, but there's a long way from that to the hospital. In the biomedical field there is this intermediate category of research called translational research, and the view is that this should be increased relative to agriculture.
I'm sure people in the room and others will have better examples than mine, but mine dealt with the prospect of effective timing and scheduling relative to irrigation.
The next suggestion invites a paradigm shift, a change in the way we're thinking about things. In the past century, the view was that we should maximize crop production, and the way this was done with the green revolution was to maximize inputs: more water and fertilizer equals more yield. The problem is that this might not be the optimal use relative to efficiency. Let's imagine that we could cut back on the inputs, but not as strongly cut back on the yield. If we provide lower levels of water and fertilizer and still retain reasonable productivity, this might be a more optimal way to manage our resource. It would also reduce the environmental consequences.
Following from that, I chatted with a number of scientists in Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and some of them have expressed concern about the increasing requirement that they have formal funded links with industry for their research programs. I think this is great in moderation, but these same very sharp scientists should also have some independent programs, programs that are not hindered by the constraints that industrial partners might bring. In fact, some of those constraints might provide a bias that could in fact challenge some of the environmental objectives and might also limit what we could refer to as “visionary” research, research that doesn't have any near-future benefit but might help in the long run. This could be especially relevant for climate change as we think about broadening the germplasm for drought response of our crops.
Finally, as my own area of focus, in southern Alberta and elsewhere in the Prairies we've invested a lot of money on infrastructure related to agriculture, but we've generally done it primarily for agriculture. In terms of thinking about the impacts on the landscapes in western Canada, the next slide shows an aerial photograph taken while flying into Lethbridge. The circles are irrigation pivot crop circles. You'd have a similar view in Regina, Calgary, or Winnipeg. As you fly over this landscape, you can see that it has been cultivated. This is a much bigger impact than oil sands, pipelines, and many other things that are in the public media.
I would argue that we should think more broadly about agriculture, not only as providing a challenge for our environment but also as providing opportunities. There's one example in the slide. While we convey water for irrigation, let's use stream channels instead of canals, thus allowing for the secondary benefits. In fact, this relates to the prospect of riparian buffers and agroforestry that was talked about earlier.