Climate change is a major factor in flooding – but it’s not the only one GlobeDebate
Contributed to The Globe and MailLes Stanfield is an aquatic ecologist who studies the factors that influence watershed ecohealth, and the principal owner of Ecohealth Solutions.
Without question, climate change is a serious factor in all this. But it is not the only one. And believing that it is the lone issue at play means that we risk missing a major part of the story – and the solution.About 70 per cent to 80 per cent of a watershed’s area is drained by thousands of very small waterbodies, each one draining small areas. These small waterbodies – wetlands, swales, springs – are largely unmapped and unregulated.
This has been exacerbated by economic pressures forcing farmers to increase the yields from limited acreage. That has caused them to drain or bury areas that have historically been too wet to till. Urbanization also hardens and covers the land, making it harder for water to drain through it.
Some municipalities across the country have adopted policies or levies to begin to address this issue. In the Toronto and Ottawa regions, headwater policies are now in place to manage how urban development affects these systems. Right now, if flow patterns on lands being developed are already damaged, developers only need to replicate those damaged states of flows when their construction work is finished, without consideration of the flood risk downstream.
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