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Introduction

Transboundary water resource management and climate change policy in the Northwest Territories (NWT)

In 1997, the Mackenzie River Basin Transboundary Waters Master Agreement was signed by all local governments with jurisdiction over the river basin. The main goal of the Master Agreement was to commit all governments to work towards cooperative management of water and aquatic ecosystems in the entire Mackenzie River basin. The Master Agreement promoted bilateral water management agreements, such as the Bilateral Water Agreement (BWMA) between the Government of Northwest Territories (GNWT) and the Government of Alberta in 2015. This bilateral agreement seeks to create a framework for the implementation of the Master Agreement and the Watershed Management and Monitoring Division of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (ENR) carries out this task within the GNWT.

The BWMA states that its implementation should be based on a Risk Informed Management (RIM) approach, pursuing, among other objectives, a cooperative learning process by establishing and implementing learning plans outlined by risks levels, nature and potential uses of transboundary waters (Mackenzie River Basin Bilateral Water Management Agreement, 2015). Moreover, the influence of climate change on transboundary water resources is one of the topics that the learning plans should address. As part of the learning plan, several agreement-based efforts have been undertaken in the NWT, such as The Hay River Basin State of the Aquatic Knowledge report (2016), the Slave River and Delta State of Knowledge and Vulnerability Assessment reports (2016), and the implementation of Alberta’s Lower Athabasca Regional Plan (Alberta-Northwest Territories Bilateral Management Committee Annual Report to Ministers 2015-2016, 2017).

At the same time, the GNWT has recognized the challenges that climate change brings to the territory and thus, developed the 2030 NWT Climate Change Strategic Framework (Government of Northwest Territories, 2018). This document points to the strategies by which the NWT should respond to challenges and opportunities associated with a changing climate for the next decade. The strategy is based on three main goals: 1) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 2005 levels by 2030; 2) to improve knowledge of the climate change impacts occurring in the Northwest Territories (NWT); and 3) to build resilience and adapt to a changing climate.

Subsequently, the 2019-2023 Action Plan for implementing the strategic framework was created, which incentivized initiatives involving climate-related research and monitoring strategies with the potential to become tools for decision-makers. The action plan also supports interdisciplinary research on economic, social, environmental and health-related changes associated with climate change, including changes in permafrost and water quality, quantity and flow over time.

Climate change status and its impacts on water resources

Under the RIM classification system, the Hay and Slave River basins are classified as Class 3 risk level (Mackenzie River Basin Bilateral Water Management Agreement, 2015). This class requires the Parties to establish objective settings that, along with the development of a learning plan for transboundary waters, must initiate an intensive Bilateral Water Management program to address specific issues, while taking into account specific vulnerabilities and sensitive water use, as it relates to water quantity, quality and biology. Addressing such issues requires that the Parties are committed to understanding is the impact of climate change on water resources of the Hay and Slave River basins (Mackenzie River Basin Bilateral Water Management Agreement, 2015).

Modelling future climatic and hydrologic characteristics involves high levels of uncertainty, primarily due to the lack of reliable information. Most monitoring stations of the Canadian National Hydrometric Network and the Surface Weather and Climate monitoring network are located in the southern part of the country. Thus, there is insufficient coverage of the Canadian North (Audit of the National Hydrometric Program, 2010; Mekis et al., 2018), which may lead to inadequate descriptions of water characteristics and trends in the northern region (Bush & Lemmen, 2019). Furthermore, of the stations located in the North, even fewer have complete long-term records that can provide baseline data for trend detection.

The hydrological context of the Hay and Slave River basins are different from each other. The Slave River receives the discharge of two highly intervened upstream river basins, the Athabasca and the Peace Rivers, both of which have been widely monitored and studied (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, 2012). On the other hand, the Hay River basin is a single, smaller and less-developed basin, with fewer information available on its hydrologic cycle (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, 2014).

From a climate change perspective, the temperature changes observed in Canada between 1948 and 2016 point to an average temperature increase of 1.7°C in the annual mean. This is roughly twice the overall observed temperature rises in Earth (0.8°C) (Bush & Lemmen, 2019). In northern Canada, the mean annual temperature has increased by 2.3°C over the same period, almost three times the global warming rate, and the mean temperature in winter has raised by 4.3°C (Bush & Lemmen, 2019). Precipitation trends in northern Canada hold high levels of uncertainty, mainly due to limited long-term data availability from northern stations (Bush & Lemmen, 2019). Vincent et al. (2018) studied trends in several indices relevant to climate change. The study concluded that the number of days with snowfall and heavy snowfall have increased in the Canadian north over the past 65 years. Additionally, based on locally normalized precipitation measurements from stations in northern Canada, an average increase in precipitation of 30% has been reported from 1948 to 2012 (Bush & Lemmen, 2019).

Climate system responses vary from one region to another, and expected hydrology-related impacts in cold regions for the NWT include longer growing seasons, extreme weather events and permafrost thawing. For instance, warmer weather for longer periods is likely to boost the diversity of substrates for diatom growth and further increase its overall primary production in lakes and wetlands (Coleman et al., 2015). Permafrost thaw may lead to several changes such as increases in hydrological discharge (Connon et al., 2014), alterations in forest distribution in discontinuous permafrost zones (Baltzer et al., 2013), and increases in release of previously frozen carbon to the atmosphere as a Green House Gas (Thierry et al., 2016). Finally, extreme events are likely to occur more frequently and with increased magnitudes, manifested as intense snowfalls during winter and significant flooding, because of changing precipitation magnitudes and spring run-off conditions (Environment and Natural Resources, 2008).

Aims and objectives

The overarching goal of this project is to describe the potential hazards and impacts of climate change on water resources in the Hay and Slave River basins. This project aims to initiate a learning and research process to understand the impacts of climate change on the transboundary water resources in the Hay and Slave River basins. The project seeks to summarise all available information on climate change and climate change-related impacts on water resources in the two basins, to identify gaps in knowledge and research on climate change risk and impacts in these basins, and to analyze current trends in temperature, precipitation and discharges. The project will provide recommendations and outline future priorities, which will inform new monitoring and research initiatives under the BWMA.

In order to achieve these aims, the specific objectives in this project are to:

  1. Conduct a systematic literature review of scientific research on climate change and associated impacts on water resources (water quality, water quantity, and biology) in the Hay and Slave River basins and adjacent basins with similar land-cover and hydrological characteristics.

  2. Analyse historical hydrometric and climate data available for the Hay and Slave River basins to detect temporal and spatial changes.

  3. Establish a framework for climate risk assessment of water resources that integrates climate change-related risks into the Risk Informed Management (RIM) approach of the BWMA.