What the California drought means for Canadians
A record drought in California is causing the state to enact restrictions on the use of water. McMaster's Dustin Garrick says Canadians aren't immune to the water crisis happening south of the border.
Dustin Garrick, McMaster’s Philomathia Chair in Water Policy, says Canada isn’t immune to the effects of the California water crisis. He explains why in the Globe and Mail on April 7:
More than a year after U.S. President Barack Obama visited the parched fields of California’s breadbasket – the Central Valley – an already severe and sustained drought has intensified in the world’s ninth-largest economy.
California just announced its lowest Sierra Nevada snowpack in history for this time of year. Unlike a hurricane, which departs as suddenly as it appears, we now have a front row seat for the slow-moving disaster that is drought. We may feel at a safe distance, cradled by the Great Lakes – the world’s largest surface freshwater system – but Canadians are not immune from the impacts of these droughts.
Like a financial crisis, drought is a ‘systemic risk’ – and we are all part of the economic and geopolitical system impacted by current shortages in California and Sao Paulo, Brazil. The consequences of the California drought do not stop with the California border or even the Western United States. These ripple effects are delivered through global trade, potential for price shocks in agricultural commodity markets, and energy security issues due to the double crunch of lost hydropower supplies and rising energy demand for groundwater pumping. (In 2013 alone, Canada imported $2.7-billion in food products from California according to Statistics Canada.)
Read What the California drought means for Canadians in the Globe and Mail
