Canadian Water Network’s CEO, Nicola Crawhall, sat down for an in-depth interview with Kim Sturgess, founder and recently retired CEO of WaterSMART Solutions Ltd. Kim has served as president of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She is also a recipient of the Order of Canada for her outstanding achievements, dedication to community, and service to the nation. In this interview, she explains how she and her team approached engaging water users in areas with limited water supply, building trust, and the trade-offs that must be made.

You started WaterSMART Solutions in 2005, around the time that Alberta’s Water for Life strategy was released. What opportunity did you see?

I had started and sold a couple of businesses, and I decided that I wanted to do something impactful in the world. I’m a water person. Water people are born, we’re not made. You’ve got the fire in the belly and the water in the soul.

At that time, the Water for Life strategy had just been launched by the Government of Alberta. Its three pillars are safe, secure, drinking water for all, healthy aquatic ecosystems, and water for a sustainable economy. It was that last one that interested me because nobody was doing work in that area. One of my mentors, Peter Lougheed, former Premier of Alberta, who was a water person, once told me that in the future, water would be more important than oil and gas in Alberta.

So, I formed WaterSMART with a mission to improve water management practices and technologies for the benefit of all Albertans. It was a tough go until August 2006, when the Alberta government closed the South Saskatchewan basin to new water license applications because the basin was overallocated. Overnight, we had a business and it has been successful since then. It was lucky, like a lot of businesses. You have to be good, but also you have to be in the right place at the right time.

Does it take a crisis for people to pay attention to water, or do you think people are paying more attention now?

Sadly, it takes a crisis. People knew they had to take action during the 2000-01 drought, which was the worst in southern Alberta in 500 years. Alberta has a seniority-based water rights system, where those with senior rights can take their full entitlement, leaving junior rights holders with no water. So you can have 100 people with all the water and 500 with none.

A colleague, Dave McGee from the Government of Alberta, brought together the water license holders and negotiated an agreement with the senior rights holders to reduce their use so that everybody, including communities, could have water. It was an informal process driven by a man with a vision.

We built on Dave McGee’s efforts. In 2008, following the closure of the South Saskatchewan River Basin to new water licences, we brought that group of water license holders together again to develop better solutions. WaterSMART had started working with what is now Hazen on a modelling tool called OASIS, which enabled us to collaborate with license holders by incorporating their operations and data to build scenarios for discussion.

In 2010, we started a project in the Bow River Valley that brought together all of those who know the water best — municipal representatives, the Watershed Planning and Advisory Council, irrigators, TransAlta, and others with a connection to the water. We used OASIS to walk them through the model and explore different scenarios. Then we did some role-playing about a severe drought situation. We continued this work over several years.

There was an aha moment when I knew we had something. Initially, all the sectors sat at separate tables: the irrigators, the operators, the energy producers. Then they started talking to the fish table. Suddenly, the discussion was about, “If TransAlta does this and the City does that and the irrigators can hold off two more weeks, that’s enough time for the fish to spawn and to get into the river.” All of a sudden, everyone in the room realized that if we just talked to one other and made some small operational changes, we could find practical ways to collaborate.

Then the 2013 flood hit. We went from drought to flooding. Because water is very personal, its impact is very localized. A flood can wipe out your house or business, while your neighbour is unaffected. At that point, we were able to repurpose our OASIS tool, originally calibrated for long-term drought analysis with daily stamps on minimum flows, and adapt it for flood response. The focus shifted to short timeframes, maximum flows, and hourly time stamps. We needed much faster reaction times. We were able to make the shift in just four months because the relationships and trust were already in place.

The Government of Alberta was thrilled to have the right people at the table to figure out what needed to be done to address the flooding. In under a year, work was underway on flood mitigation measures, including the construction of a $40-million spillway at Bassano Dam to make it more resilient. The same people still get together to work on water security projects. They are known as the Bow River Working Group.

So, does it take a crisis? Yes. But it’s equally important to maintain relationships between crises because these agreements take a long time to negotiate. When we entered another drought cycle in 2023, we were able to bring together the same group and use the same tools.

Relationship building is key. You also talk about showing the license holders a picture of the future through scenarios and modelling. How important was that?

Showing a picture is hugely compelling, but it has to be science-based. The tool is grounded in data and reflects how the system actually works. Prior to our approach, regulatory tools assumed that license holders were taking 100 percent of their allocated water, and  that results in an over-allocated basin. That doesn’t work. So we asked a more practical question: what are you actually using?

Agricultural irrigation, by far, consumes the most water, about 90 percent globally. Here in Alberta, about 67 percent of our water is consumed by agriculture. So the food guys drive water use.

That meant we had to sit down with the irrigators, the largest and most senior license holders. Strictly speaking, they can do whatever they want with the water. So why don’t they? What motivates them to share? The answer is simple: irrigators are part of the same water community as everyone else. It’s where they live, where their friends and family live. It’s where their schools, their hockey rinks, and their hospitals are. They don’t want their communities to go without water, so they make trade-offs. Understanding their priority hierarchy is important. Those priorities are written right in the water sharing agreements from 2024 and irrigation is the last priority — and the irrigators are fine with that.

Your engagement around water management is science-based. What have you observed about online misinformation and communicating with the public?

I’m surprised at some of the stories that are out there. Even some of the politicians listen to them. After all these years of us doing this collaborative work and developing a roadmap that says, “If you want to keep living in southern Alberta, here are the things you need to do and you need to start now.” The work is all science-based. Everybody bought in, including government. And then a politician will say, “I’ve got a good idea. Let’s take the oil sands legacy tailings just pipe them south down to irrigate fields .”

That’s actually something people have promoted. Meanwhile, the oil sands operators are going, “Are you mad? We’re going to get sued to death.” And the irrigators are saying, “We’re not putting legacy tailings on our food because we’ll never sell a barrel of grain again.”

It’s a big concern that these ideas get traction. People amplify them online without checking the facts. Others suggest piping water from the Athabasca River down to southern Alberta. From an engineering point of view, we’ve run the numbers and it’s completely uneconomic. The operating costs alone would be like half a billion dollars a year. For that amount, we can rebuild all the infrastructure we need in the south rather than one pipeline that’s only going to scratch the surface of the problem. It makes no sense.

That said, there are excellent resources that are science based and easy to navigate. I recommend the Canada WaterPortal, which I founded in 2006 for just this purpose.

You’ve said that the water-energy-food nexus is a critical issue that needs our attention. Can you tell me more about that?

When it comes to water and climate, there is a growing conflict between people, food, and energy. You have to make trade-offs. There’s only so much water to go around. So how do you do that? We need to start thinking about this. It’s fundamental.

If you look at the amount of sustainable water supplies available globally and project them against current demand, you run into a wall around 2050 when the global population reaches 10 billion. With 90 percent of that water being used in agriculture, that’s the pinch point. It not about whether we have enough water overall. It’s whether we have enough water to grow the food to feed the people. That is the crisis.

Water moves around the world in food. If we think about the 10 largest food-producing regions, they’re effectively exporting water through agricultural trade. Canada is in that list, along with the United States, Australia, China, India, Indonesia, and Ukraine, to name a few.

A U.S. Department of Energy study from a few years ago examined agricultural intensity and found that among the world’s top agricultural regions, Canada is the only one that can increase its production on existing farmland by 2050. Most of that land is in Western Canada. That gives us an obligation to help solve this global problem.

That’s why I focus so much on food. What can we do on the land to keep it productive in the face of climate change and water scarcity? That question is at the heart of the Saskatchewan River Basin water roadmap, which outlines short-, medium-, and long-term actions. And the longer-term actions are the big things.

Glaciers, our natural water reservoirs, are melting away. Over time, we are seeing earlier glacier melts in the spring, which shifts the entire precipitation curve earlier in the year. Then we have hotter and drier summers, when we need that water most. If the irrigators don’t capture water in their storage earlier in the spring, it simply flows into Saskatchewan. We need that water to grow more food here in Alberta. I know there are lots of people who don’t like storage, but we need more of it because it alone can stretch out our water supplies for generations.

Another key roadmap action involves reoperating hydro facilities to prioritize water security rather than maximizing hydropower alone. The impact on power generation is pretty minimal and can be offset by compensating power producers. But the impact on the watershed is enormous.

We also need to invest in natural infrastructure, water reuse, and conservation measures that can deliver immediate benefits. All of these approaches are needed.

How should we negotiate with and manage new industrial water demand from data centres, microchip manufacturers, and EV battery plants?

With data centers, the big water issue is around which cooling technology they use. If cooling is entirely air-based, your energy use is enormous. If it’s entirely water-based, your water use is enormous. For that reason, some folks are looking at a balance between the two.

For a two-gigawatt data centre, it’s important to consider the water footprint in practical terms: how many irrigation pivots does that water use represent, and how many farms would you be taking out? The numbers are significant, so we need to be clear about the trade-offs.

Municipalities also need to look at whether they have sufficient water to meet new industrial demand, given existing pressures like population growth. There will come a time in Alberta when additional population growth will require a reduction in food production. Adding water-intensive industrial facilities accelerates that timeline. That’s why it’s important to look at the consumptive use of these facilities, not just withdrawals.

In southern Alberta, many industrial uses are just not water-viable. Some of these industries are moving north, where there is much more water. However, northern regions are also dealing with droughts, particularly smaller tributaries. The amount of water being drawn from some of these small rivers in northern Alberta is becoming an issue.

Water is typically the fifth consideration in a company’s decision-making process after access to energy, land, fibre optics (to put the data into the ‘cloud’), and workforce. That’s when they say, “Oh yeah, I guess we better figure out the cooling system.” One of the most important messages I repeat to these companies is that water is the most constrained resource in Southern Alberta. So you should probably move that up in your decision-making process.

The Premier is very committed to building data centres, but there are a lot of bumps in the road and the rest of the world is moving very, very fast. Addressing water constraints early and realistically will be essential to making those investments viable.