Grant: Strategic Network Grants Program

Drinking water is one of society's most critical water needs and delivery of safe drinking water-security-is a national strategic priority. Most Canadians are just becoming aware how fragile this essential resource is and the potentially catastrophic effects climate change and high energy costs can have on drinking water security. To reduce risks to public health, Health Canada relies on the "multi-barrier approach" to prevent or reduce the contamination of drinking water from source to tap. All variations of this framework identify source water protection (SWP) for risk prevention and in-plant treatment technologies for risk management. Notably, all of the barriers in this framework must be effective to ensure drinking water security. Climate change-associated disturbances (wildfires, hurricanes, floods) have revealed alarming inadequacies in current implementations of the multi-barrier approach. These disturbances are causing increasingly variable or deteriorated source quality, and challenging in-plant treatment technologies beyond design and operational response capacities, to the point of service disruptions. Water industry consensus points to the pressing need for new SWP technologies for climate change adaptation to ensure secure community water systems. In Canada, effective SWP must focus on forested source watersheds because that is where the drinking water for most urban, rural, and Indigenous communities originates. Healthy forests typically produce high quality water-the value of natural storage and filtration of water by global forests has been estimated at $4.1 trillion. Forest management approaches have been suggested as SWP technologies and include thinning or prescribed burning for pre-emptive risk reduction or reactive effects mitigation of potentially catastrophic disturbances. While forest management impacts on water have been well studied, little if any of that work has focused specifically on drinking water treatability, which will likely vary in regionally. The forWater Network will provide new knowledge regarding the impacts of different forest management strategies on drinking water source quality and treatability to assess their suitability as SWP technologies across the major ecological/forest regions of Canada.