Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and other members of the committee.
Thank you for the privilege of participating here today. Land management in our agricultural regions governs hydrologic response to extreme weather and will play a critical role in ensuring Canadian agriculture and ecosystem sustainability under a changing climate.
Beneficial management practices that incorporate wetlands, grasslands, cover crops, minimum tillage and controlled drainage all promote surface water and groundwater availability, improve water quality and resiliency to flood, drought and disease stress.
As climate change continues to impact surface water, groundwater is becoming increasingly important to agriculture and ecosystem productivity, yet initiatives currently proposed to address water resources in Canada ignore groundwater.
To underscore the importance of groundwater, in many rural areas and first nation lands it is often the sole source of water for both people and livestock.
In the face of increasing hydrologic uncertainty, tools that extend traditional weather forecasts into water resource forecasts will become critical. Hydrologic forecasting is already commonplace in the water resources management community, however the most common forecasting tools focus on river flow and overlook the dynamic link between groundwater and surface water. Without groundwater, we are not well suited to look at agricultural drought end points.
An example of an agriculture-focused, hydrologic prediction system that does include groundwater exists in southern Manitoba, where the Manitoba Forage and Grassland Association water forecast portal now generates field-scale weekly and monthly forward-looking hydrologic projections.
It is equally important to enhance our ability to project hydrologic conditions farther out into the future and over much larger areas. This is the objective of the relatively new Canada1Water initiative. Canada1Water is a collaborative government interdepartmental, industry and academic-driven project led by the Geological Survey of Canada and Aquanty and has developed, for the first time ever, a national scale hydrologic modelling framework with open data to project climate change impacts on the surface water and groundwater inventory over the entirety of Canada.
Even though a better understanding of short-term and long-term impacts to water resources is vital to Canada's economic and societal sustainability, projects like those mentioned are challenging to launch and perhaps even more challenging to sustain.
The MFGA water portal was funded by a now discontinued agricultural risk management program and current funding for these tools is difficult to obtain.
Canada1Water was launched with a considerable investment in time and expertise from the Geological Survey of Canada's groundwater geoscience program and $1 million in funding over three years from the Canadian safety and security program, a source of seed money but not sustained funding.
Here we're not talking about the need for tens of millions of dollars per year, but rather budgets on the order of a few million dollars per year and a commitment of government lab resources to help deliver world-class hydrologic insights that meet the needs of a broad range of stakeholders.
In closing, if I could make three recommendations for the committee to consider they would be to, one, support the development of programs that provide economic return to producers who adopt land management practices that promote hydrologic resiliency; two, recognize that decision support tools focused on water resources will become increasingly important to our agricultural community, and Canadian technology is leading the way both in Canada and around the world; and three, look into the Canada1Water project and help it find sustained funding to support this valuable initiative.
Thank you.