Integrated water resource management and British Columbia’s Okanagan Basin Water Board

Landscape Based Agricultural Water Demand Modeling—A Tool for Water Management Decision Making in British Columbia, Canada

“…These temperature effects were greater for Interior than for Coastal regions. This stresses the need for a localized and regional approach to water management in BC (Cohen et al, 2006;Melnychuk et al, 2016) as the policies and regulations put in place for one region may not work in another. The course of global socio-economic development will also have an uneven impact on BC's IWD.…”

“…Considerable attention has been focused on incorporating science based decision making into water resource planning in the Okanagan Basin (Melnychuk et al, 2016) and there is on-going interest in pursuing both basin-wide drought and flood management strategies. The Okanagan water stewardship council, which is a long-standing committee of water professionals includes representives of As much of the region is supplied by large water purveyors, who have storage licenses for large upland reservoirs and/or withdrawal licenses from large valley bottom lakes, drought management strategies are largely aimed at retaining sufficient storage for winter and early spring withdrawals for non-irrigation purposes and instream flow requirements.…”

“…Similarly, some systems, particularly in pasture/forage production may be chronically under-supplied unless the most efficient irrigation technology is adopted. Thus drought planning may need to take into account both a realistic development of water allocation thresholds and incentives for changes in irrigation management that go beyond the use of water pricing as the major mechanism for change (Melnychuk et al, 2016). A further option is the development of more water storage if there is sufficient water supply to fill new reservoirs.…”

“…Such discussions necessarily will require input from both stakeholders and decision makers. A successful model for collaborative decision making is the Okanagan Water Stewardship Council (Melnychuk et al, 2016), which has a membership of local, regional, provincial, federal and First Nations planners and technical experts. In addition there are members from academia, professional associations and sector groups (forestry, agriculture, tourism).…”

“…Supplying water to all of these needs plus those for other ecosystem requirements is potentially conflict ridden considering that supply is dependent on highly variable annual snowpack (https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/environment/air-landwater/water/water-science-data/water-data-tools/snow-surveydata). Since the drought of 2003, there have been several initiatives to avoid conflicts among water users (particularly agricultural, domestic users and government departments protecting environmental flow needs) and to plan for the future through dialogue (Cohen et al, 2006;Melnychuk et al, 2016) and scientific assessment of water resources (Merritt et al, 2006;Neilsen et al, 2006;Okanagan Basin Water Board, 2011). Much of the dialogue has been led by the Okanagan Basin Water Board (OBWB) and its Stewardship Council, with a commitment to provide scientifically informed decision making (Melnychuk et al, 2016).…”