I have a couple of thoughts. One is that it is a worst-case scenario. That is the case where we continue to essentially follow the trajectory we're on in terms of taking coal, oil and natural gas out of the ground as quickly as we can and burning it as quickly as we can. Hopefully we don't go down that pathway. It's what scientists refer to as an RCP 8.5 scenario.
Yes, water scarcity is an ongoing challenge in western North America. There will be localized variations in that.
In terms of the economic impacts of a 500% increase in drought severity or frequency in western Canada, I don't think anybody studied the agricultural economics of that, but I think it's fairly easy to calculate, if one wanted to, in terms of just looking at the insured crop losses that will occur, say, over the next five-year period. From that you can make some extrapolations. Plus, then you have the urban impacts. A city like Edmonton, for example, needs to have a certain amount of surface water in the river in order to accept waste water for treatment and to provide drinking water and so on. These are quantifiable. Obviously, you can assume, in very simple math, that a 500% increase in frequency or severity of droughts would have a corresponding economic cost.
Then again, I've also studied historical droughts such as the ones of the 1970s on the Great Plains. There's often a cascading effect. The drought is just the start of an economic crisis. If you look at the 1970s and 1980s, droughts on the Great Plains coincided with a period of rising interest rates. Many farmers found that the drought put them into a position where they were borrowing money to get through the drought, and then interest rates rose. That helped trigger the farm crisis in the United States in the 1980s.
All this is to say, Mr. Bittle, that yes, it's quantifiable, and it's obviously something we would want to avoid.