Four Out of Ten. Hey, That's Still Less Than Half.

We know that as climate change steadily closes in around us, our resilience as communities, societies even as a civilization will be tested. Droughts, floods, severe storm events of increasing frequency, duration and intensity are already setting in.

Then there's the environmental threat Maude Barlow warns is almost equally threatening as global warming, the global freshwater crisis. We're running out of clean, fresh water. We're consuming more than there is to hand and in many places that's not very much to begin with. Then there's our now broken and still deteriorating hydrologic cycle that has shifted precipitation patterns into a "feast or famine" mode. Normally wet regions appear to be getting wetter whilst dry regions are getting ever more arid and hotter.

Where people have the means they may choose to make good shortages of surface water, precipitation, by turning to ground water. In some cases that means wells. In others it means tapping into ancient aquifers. The problem is that when we go after groundwater, we become dependent on it even as we tend to draw down the resource many times faster than its recharge rate. In places like California's San Joaquin valley it's resulted in subsidence in excess of 30-feet over the past decade.

The latest research suggests that,  by 2030, just 14-years down the road, forty per cent of humanity will not have access to safe, clean water. There are several technologies becoming available that will make filtration viable and others that will free up groundwater. They're all needed and very important but, for all of the good, they're still bandaid solutions. They don't build sustainability. They don't repair the broken hydrologic cycle.

At times it seems as though we're in some environmental lab experiment. We're being subjected to changing impacts, new "normals". As I sit here watching yet another deluge outside my window I'm reminded that we may be getting a lot of rain but we're not getting the winter snowpacks that the local ecosystem hinges on. Without that snowpack there may be insufficient fresh, cold water in our rivers and streams to encourage the salmon to come upstream to spawn in the summer months. Without salmon spawning, bears, wolves, eagles and other creatures are deprived of the fatty flesh they need to survive. Without salmon-stuffed predators the forests lose out on essential fertilizer. The forests also become prone to drying out during the hot summer months, inviting more fires. It really is the circle of life.

And you folks back East have your own water problems. This summer's drought was pretty nasty. What's often overlooked is how your warming temperatures play into the hydrologic cycle. The greatest change is not in daytime temperatures or heatwaves. It's in night time temperatures that aren't dropping as they once did. Hotter night times mean more overnight evaporation, surface moisture lost to the atmosphere.

While Canada's water situation, due mainly to our northern latitude, may seem insignificant compared to what's facing the populations of tropical and equatorial nations, we are far from being secure.

We Need New Ways of Pricing Natural Capital

A case in point.  This summer's B.C. spot prawn season got derailed - by Asia.  Delicious local prawns that usually would go for 8-9 dollars a pound were suddenly demanding prices of 38-39 dollars a pound, head on, in Vancouver.

What happened?  Apparently Asia's (China's) shrimp/prawn stocks succumbed to some sort of environmental disorder.  Asian buyers flocked to buy up British Columbia's prawn catch (and Dungeness crabs to boot), sending market prices through the roof.  Vancouver restaurants were reported to have taken them off the menu, substituting far more affordable Atlantic lobster instead.

In the midst of this I wound up at my doctor's office.  I sat beside a fellow in the waiting room who had brought a plastic bag full of something.  It turned out he was a prawn fisherman who had brought a bag of his finest as a gift for the same doctor I see. 

We began a discussion about the prawn market and this fellow was giddy at the windfall profits he was raking in.  At this point I asked the fisherman what the people of British Columbia got out of the prawns he was flogging to Asia?  After all, I said, weren't those prawns really the property of the province and people of British Columbia?  These were wild sea life.  The harvesters didn't operate prawn hatcheries.  They didn't feed the creatures.  All they did was show up to harvest and sell our prawns, my prawns.  So, when prices go through the roof for my prawns, high enough that I and most of my fellow British Columbians are priced out of the market, why then should the market windfall at least not belong to us, not the harvester?

It strikes me that we've become a little too lax in allowing those who really do little besides harvesting, packaging and distributing commodities based on public property, natural resources, to accede to ownership at below market prices.  If the market price escalates, so too should the public's share of that enhanced value.  In the case of seafood, such a provision could easily be incorporated into our licensing regime. 

Products such as freshwater would require different treatment.  Water is often one of those great government give-aways especially for big business.  Yet water has a value.  We often hear today that it's the "new oil".  What would happen if we priced it fairly to take into account not only its inherent value but also the purpose to which it was being used and how it was treated afterward?  For example, there should be a far higher price if it is to wind up as an environmental contaminant in some massive tailing pond than if it was to be returned to nature in a clean state.  Likewise, those who seek to commodify it, for example as bottled water, should remit an amount commensurate with its retail value. 

This conundrum is so multi-faceted that it defies specific rules beyond core principles and individual applications.  Yet, in a world running scarce of so many things, we have to safeguard the public purse if only to buffer ourselves against volatile market forces that we're going to face one way or the other.

Valuing natural capital realistically isn't anti-business.  It's merely putting the public-business relationship on a fair footing.  It's also putting an end to the vast transfer of unearned wealth out of the public purse and into private pockets.