Yes, I'll go next.
I'm with Friends of the Earth, which is one of Canada's national environmental groups, which is to say that we tend to focus on national issues--among them water, biofuels, Canadian mining firms as they operate abroad, and international financial institutions.
There's no shortage of environmental groups in Canada, as you've probably already remarked. What makes Friends of the Earth unique is the fact that we're one of 70-odd members of Friends of the Earth International, an organization that I've been associated with since the mid-1970s in one way or another. It's a remarkable collection of environmental organizations, which used to be dominated by North America and Europe, and now, heavily, by far, a majority are countries from the south that are playing actively, and with whom--although each group is independent--we exchange ideas.
Let me go on now to my topic. I want to speak to you today about--I guess it would fall under this area of research that Ian mentioned--an alternative approach to water resources, an approach that goes by the name of “water soft path,” la voie douce de l'eau.
The water soft path is a unique approach in that it begins from the objective of achieving sustainability in our use of water in Canada. The concept is known not around the world but in most places in the west. But there is another unique aspect: Canada is the first place to actually undertake water soft path analysis, the first study anywhere in the world to see how far we can push this. It's a study being led by Friends of the Earth Canada, under my direction. It's composed of three parallel components, each at a different scale.
In Nova Scotia, researchers from the Arthur Irving Academy for the Environment at Acadia University are looking at the Annapolis Valley, a watershed scale.
All the way across the country, in British Columbia, researchers from the POLIS Institute at the University of Victoria are looking at several urban areas. It's municipal scale.
And maybe bravest of all, researchers from the faculty of environmental studies at the University of Waterloo are taking on the whole province. It's a provincial-scale analysis.
I left the committee copies of a journal that contains an article I co-authored, a general introduction to water soft paths; and also a pamphlet, which we have not yet translated, but the last couple of pages talk about the analysis itself, just to give some details as to how you actually undertake these analyses.
Since you have that, what I want to do in the next 10 minutes is to tell you what's really special about this approach. Why is it that we call it unique? How does it really change conventional planning? I maintain that it inverts conventional water planning and water analysis in four ways.
First, for water soft path analysis, the starting point is not a lack of water supply, it is an excess of demand. Analysis always starts by looking at the demand for water and looking at it in a particular perspective. In most cases, we don't want water as such. Drinking water is the main exception.
To choose an example, we don't really want water in what used to be called, and I think still is the best name, our water closets. What you want is to get rid of the stuff. You want a safe and effective method of sanitation. Maybe you can do that with something other than water.
For the most part, the great user of water in industry is not water as such, it's cooling. You want to cool the water, or in the case of electrical generation, condense the steam. It's not water you want.
As a useful little figure, only about 20% of the water used in a brewery ends up in the bottle. It's a very important 20%, I admit, but the other 80% is just part of the process.
Even farmers don't have a demand for water—and by this I mean delivered water, or water that comes through a pipe—they just want to have good crops.
So rather than looking at water as a commodity, we look at it as a service. This greatly expands the alternatives and the techniques that can be considered. Some of them don't require any water at all.
The second difference relates to what I mentioned earlier, that water sustainability--or more broadly, its ecological sustainability--is not something we check after making water plans. If it is not sustainable, it is not a soft path. Therefore, we allocate water to the ecosystem first. We make sure the system is sustainable; we make sure we have a ongoing healthy ecosystem before we allocate any water to human uses.
Third, the preservation of water quality is not something that's dealt with by treatment plants, or something where we use the water and then worry about how we're going to clean it up; rather, soft paths take the preservation of water quality as equally important to saving water quantity. Both quality and quantity need to be conserved.
Therefore, we try to provide water in its uses at a quality that's required. Ian already mentioned that different qualities of water have different uses. Just intuitively, it doesn't make any sense to take water from the environment, treat it to drinking quality standards, and then use it to flush water closets or, to use the more common term, toilets. You're taking something to high quality and immediately plunging it to low quality. That could instead be done with something you take off the roof or from something you get from your washing machine.
In general, the principle is to make every output the input to something else and, finally, to run whatever you have through a relatively benign biological or natural treatment system—the technique is called biomimicry, as with an artificial wetland—and then return it to the environment in as good a state as when it was withdrawn.
Fourth and finally, in what is perhaps the most important change from conventional practice, we do not begin our look to the future from the present and then project forward. To use the old line, you simply can't get there from here; it's the wrong approach, as you build in too much of what was going wrong.
Soft path analysis chooses a point 30 or 40 years in the future, and at that point it creates a model of a society that is larger in size and population, with a bigger economy, with the numbers you would get from Statistics Canada if you asked what Canada is going to look like 30 years from now. You can just take those numbers. But we model it to be as water efficient as possible, to see what we can do to create that future by minimizing the water inputs, but while still ensuring that it works.
Then we use a technique that is called backcasting—it's a created word, obviously designed to contrast with forecasting—to find a route that connects that modelled future with the very real present. You have to get from one to the other, but we do it by starting out there and coming backwards. It's the connection—both a physical connection, in that this is what you have to build, and a policy connection, in that this is what you have to make it—that is literally the soft path. But it's not just any connection. In addition to being ecologically sustainable, it must also be economically efficient, socially acceptable, and of course, politically feasible.
Backcasting is the most innovative and by far the hardest part of soft path analysis. Dreaming does not get you an acceptable answer. If soft path results—and I use a plural very specifically.... There can be lots of routes from the future to the past, and many of them may satisfy soft path criteria; it's not a deterministic approach. But if these results are to have any impact, the policies and the activities we advocate have to be not just believable but also attractive to the population.
Maybe now it's clear why we call this a soft path, une voie douce. One reason is that this approach takes a lot less concrete and a lot less steel, and it's much softer on the environment. But the main reason is that the soft path uses a lot more human ingenuity, innovation—thinking ahead to solve today's water problems, rather than trying to overcome them with bigger and better projects. We try to work with nature rather than overcome it.
I can't tell you right now how far we're going to get with our three-pronged water soft path analyses—the watershed in Nova Scotia, several urban areas in British Columbia, and the province of Ontario—because it's this summer when the hard number-crunching is going to take place. However, based on analyses elsewhere with which we think there is great comparability here, we know we could cut current water use by a third just by applying conventional economic analysis that is comparing the cost of cutting demand with the cost of new water supply.
As a guess—an informed guess, but still a guess—we think we can cut another third through application of water soft path principles. To qualify this, you won't get those savings in a year or probably even in a decade. Water soft paths define a different objective and identify a different course for the long term. That's what planning shall do, but it's not a very good approach if you have a flood right now or are expecting a drought next summer. It isn't going to work in that term; it's a long-term planning method.
In closing, I want to thank the committee for the invitation to come to speak to you today. I'd also like to thank the Policy Research Initiative. It was the first federal agency to recognize the potential of water soft paths, and I have always found—I spoke at the conference they held two years ago, and again at one that was held just a few weeks ago—that they have done more than any other agency to help get this idea on to...I can't say the public agenda yet, but the agenda of people who are worried about water in Canada.
I look forward to future meetings with you, when I'll be able to tell you about our results. Thank you very much.