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Charting a Path: Water and Canada’s Natural Resource Sectors - Discussion Paper

1. Introduction

This workshop is taking place near the beginning of the 2-year NRTEE’s Water Program to ensure we engage the appropriate stakeholders and identify the key issues, challenges and opportunities for Canada. The Program (see Annex I), as approved by the NRTEE members, broadly aims to identify the critical sustainability issues and opportunities associated with the water, natural resource sector and climate change interrelationship.

Framing the workshop (Assumptions):

Rising and competing demands for water resources create water quantity and quality issues as well as allocation challenges.
The climate is changing and this will affect groundwater, rivers and streams, lakes and reservoirs, wetlands, land-based and sea ice in different ways.
Water is expected to act as a constraint on future development and current sustainability in Canada’s energy, agricultural, forestry and mining sectors.
Solutions that are grounded in an integrated approach to water management will be needed to meet competing demands and ecosystem needs.
Existing policy and governance tools and mechanisms have inconsistent effectiveness – ongoing gaps exist.
There is much happening across Canada at the ground-level and provincial level – a challenge is connecting policy solutions.

1.1 Objectives of Workshop

In the context of this Program and recognizing the vast scope as it currently stands, the objectives of this workshop are to:

Confirm current and emerging issues, trends and opportunities in water use and natural resource sectors; and,
Solicit advice on where the NRTEE can, within the existing Program outline, best contribute to the national water agenda.

1.2 Your Role

Advice from experts will help narrow the Program’s focus and shape the outcome and success of our work. Your knowledge and experience will help determine the priority research needs and opportunities for the NRTEE to explore.

1.3 Purpose of Paper

The questions set out in this paper will be used during the workshop to guide the discussions.

This paper presents a snapshot of the issues and challenges identified to date through the NRTEE's initial scoping that fall within the water, climate change and natural resource sector interrelationship. It is not a research paper, but rather a discussion paper which is intended to set the stage for further discussion at the workshop. Therefore, the information presented in the paper remains, by intent, relatively broad and high-level. A key outcome of the workshop will be to determine if the key issues and challenges have been captured, and if not, how they could be better depicted. It will also be important to reflect on any other key issues and challenges that could be currently missing in the document. Only then can they be prioritized during the workshop in the context of vulnerabilities and gaps related to water resources and natural resource sectors’ sustainability as well as opportunities for fostering policy and governance changes through the NRTEE's Program. This will help in identifying where the NRTEE can best contribute to Canada’s water agenda.