Thank you.
Thanks for having me. I'm Kat Kavanagh, the executive director of Water Rangers. I co-founded Water Rangers in 2015 as part of the “AquaHacking” competition by AquaAction, another witness you had in the past week, I believe. It came from seeing my own father, who had been collecting water quality data for about 20 years at our local lake. He didn't have the tools to share and understand his data. This is quite a common picture that we see across community groups who care deeply about their local waterways.
Water Rangers set about to respond to community needs for those tools that lower barriers and help them participate in specifically community-based water monitoring. We've designed test kits and built an open data platform curated for the public, which is being used by 300 groups across Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and even Mexico. In Canada those groups can automatically share their dataset with DataStream, whom you heard from on Tuesday, a national database for water quality data.
We know that water quality data is desperately needed. According to the 2020 watershed reports, published by WWF Canada, over 60% of subwatersheds are considered data-deficient. That means we don't even have enough data to give them a score. This is better than it was in 2017, when over 70% were data-deficient. It's through efforts of environmental non-profits like DataStream and those community-based water monitoring groups across the country that we're starting to make some progress in filling those gaps. There's a long way to go, but we're starting to see a path forward. This year Water Rangers, supported by AquaAction, will be publishing the next watershed reports. Stay tuned for those results later this year.
Since the theme today is speaking to international relationships, I want to give two brief examples of where we're working with organizations in the U.S. to coordinate and standardize on both sides of Lake Erie through the Lake Erie volunteer science network. Canadians need to play a bigger role here, but there is a willingness and desire to simplify sharing across borders.
In the U.K., I'm part of a collaborative of over 80 leaders of NGOs, industry, government and researchers in a program called CaSTCo. They're investing in my participation and our tools to help create pathways for community-based water monitoring to be integrated into achieving healthier rivers here. Their investment at a national scale is substantial. It's based on collaboration amongst all those stakeholders at a watershed scale. There is an example of something we can learn from in Canada.
The Brits, though, were impressed about how Canadian non-profit collaboration is equipping communities to openly share data and share results. I gave them the example of how community groups are using Water Rangers to collect their data, share their data openly, embed it on their own websites, share with their local communities, share that data with DataStream to sit alongside government and research data, and then be part of national assessments like the watershed reports.
Coordinating, building meaningful relationships and sharing learnings takes time and effort. Canadian non-profit organizations are doing amazing work with a fraction of the resources of other countries. We should be proud of what we've been able to accomplish there. An example is the community-based water monitoring collaborative, which we are also helping lead.
We're building resources like the business case for the investment in community-based water monitoring tool kit, so that groups on the ground level in those communities who care deeply about their local waterways can express their value to funders to support in local projects. Research by the International Institute for Sustainable Development has shown in a report that community-based water monitoring groups multiply investments three to 14 times. We've heard from other witnesses about the endowment fund in B.C. that is starting to strengthen water resilience there. It's a model I'd love to see replicated across the country for supporting and strengthening water stewardship.
I will leave you with two brief recommendations. One, invest in leadership and innovation in community-based water monitoring data collection and sharing. Two, build communities' long-term capacity to participate in evidence-informed decision-making for their local waterways. Communities care deeply about water.
Thank you.