Sure. We were parsing it in two ways. You have projected population growth in Canada. Also, my colleagues in the water community are always talking about the fact that even in the global sense, Canada has a lot of water. Most of the population is in the south, concentrated in certain areas. We create scarcity through increasing demand, basically by increasing industry and development, sometimes a bit above the carrying capacity of local water resources.
There are the local pressures that will come with increasing population growth and thus development in any corridor. In the Great Lakes basin, there are many discussions about protecting green space, creating corridors. Those pressures will continue.
The other part that I spoke to is the larger picture; that is, we're part of the interconnectedness of global population increase. There is an expectation there will be nine billion people by 2050. I think by 2030 it's already projected to be eight billion. The expectation is that if we go on as we are doing, we will require 40% more delivered or developed water supplies globally to sustain those populations.
It's not just the population growth itself, but the fact that so many of the world's economies, particularly the BRIC nations, are rising in economic status. When you rise in economic status, that means the diet changes and the expectation of consumer consumption is changed. It's not just that there are more people on the planet, but now they're starting to use water resources as we are in Europe and North America and the developed world.
One thing that is part of the durable competitive advantage in the way we talk about managing our water well so that we're able to deal with those population increases is what I talked about. It's an economic reality that there are products and services needed to serve that emergent world.
I may have the numbers wrong, but I have a report which says, I think, that Canada is one of the top five agricultural exporting countries in the world. What distinguishes us is that a couple of those are right up against the top.... Australia is right up there, but they have basically maximized, with the droughts they have, what they can produce. Canada still has quite a long way to go.
The expectation that literally feeding the world—producing goods and services that other countries have difficulty producing because they don't have the benefit of these water resources—is likely to be the larger pressure and opportunity or benefit for Canada in terms of population increase. We see that it is going to require good stewardship to take advantage of it.