CHRIS WOOD is a veteran international journalist and former Maclean’s editor and correspondent. He has written for The Globe and Mail, The Financial Post, The Walrus, TheTyee.ca, and more. His writing on water has won two Gold National Magazine Awards, and he was co-author of Blockbusters and Trade Wars, which was shortlisted for the Donner Prize.

Chris’ new book DRY SPRING, which examines the future of water in North American, is not just “another book about ‘climageddon’,” he promises. It is about what we can all do, indeed must do, to ensure that we survive the changes in our climate: “There are many reasons to be apprehensive about the quarter-century ahead. Many things could go terribly wrong… Water, however, is at the heart of solving all these other problems. If we can get the water part right, we will have the chance to apply our astonishing collective ingenuity and adaptive capacity to all the rest.”

After three decades of reporting natural phenomena, Chris’ research took him to the deck of a foreign freighter transiting the Great Lakes, the bed of the drained Colorado River south of the Mexican border, and the Rocky Mountain foothills where a century-old ditch recalls a long-forgotten standoff between Canada and the United States. He recorded scores of personal interviews with ranchers, vintners, fishermen, ship captains, families who have fled their homes - all so readers could “experience the impacts of climate change today through people like themselves.”

In the book Chris focuses on the years immediately ahead. Suggesting realistic solutions, he courts controversy by challenging lobbyists who oppose the so-called ‘commodification’ of water. According to Chris, these well meaning activists are not saving the environment, but instead setting it on a path to destruction. “Nothing inspires innovation faster than a problem that can be solved profitably,” he argues. “Once we shed our fear of mentioning water and markets in the same breath, a panoply of inexpensive, effective and adaptive solutions begin to recommend themselves.”

Chris lives in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, where he is active in local efforts to achieve a more sustainable community. We corresponded by email.

When did you first become interested in the weather and climate?

I’ve lived most of my life in the country, where weather is much more present in your day. That was especially so over the nearly ten years that I spent living on boats. You notice when the weather changes more than if your day is spent inside buildings. I made the connection between climate change and the increasing wildness of the weather when I had the opportunity to interview one of Canada’s top climate scientists in the aftermath of a horrendous ice storm that devastated eastern Ontario and southern Quebec.

Why did you decide to focus on water?

Weather is where climate touches down in our life, and the most important variable in the weather is water. Is it raining today? Snowing? How many days has it been since we last had rain? Storms that also bring rain, like hurricanes and typhoons, do more damage than winds alone do. Droughts (too little rain) and floods (too much) are the number 1 and number 2 most-costly types of natural disaster.

Weather, when you think about it, is also our only renewable source of clean water. Even the water in rivers, lakes and most wells depends ultimately on rain and snowfall. Everything else that we do, from growing food to making goods for sale, also depends on that water. After I had been following the science on climate change for a little while, I realized that the effects of ‘global warming’ weren’t waiting for the middle or end of the century to be felt. They are apparent already in the way that weather patterns are changing and hence, how our ultimate source of water is changing.
Changes in the availability, reliability and quality of our water supply will be the most acutely felt impact of climate change. And they are already upon us.

Are we really facing a water crisis?

Yes - and no. It’s important to distinguish between water resources on a large scale, viewed across a whole continent or over the period of a year, and what is available in a particular community right now, today. Over the world as a whole, across North America or all of Canada, there is enough water in theory to meet all our needs. (Canada is even getting more water than it used to). Of course none of us actually live in theory. And in the real places where we do live, climate change is making local water problems more acute.

The explanation for the paradox is this: climate change is also making weather more variable and extreme. That is, the weather is swinging from unusually wet to unusually dry with increasingly rapidity and becoming more extreme at the margins: wetter when it’s wet, but also drier when it’s dry. At the same time, climate change is moving entire features of the global weather system around, so for instance, rain which used to be reliable as clockwork in certain places and seasons, now falls either somewhere else or during another time of year.

So our water crisis is real, but it manifests differently from place to place.

How is the crisis manifesting itself?

In some regions it may be felt in water shortages. That’s been true lately in the American southeast where major urban regions like Atlanta have come within weeks of draining their reservoirs dry. In other places (or even the same ones at other times) the crisis may be felt in torrential downpours that overwhelm drains and flood homes under record amounts of runoff water.

It may also be felt in less obvious ways. When a combination of climate change and development reduces the amount of rainwater that percolates beneath the ground, aquifers decline and wells run dry. When summer rainfall arrives in fewer but heavier rainstorms, it washes enormous volumes of toxic pollutants off roads and fertilizer excess out of fields, flushing these into swollen rivers where the unprecedented flows are also increasing erosion. So we see that too, especially in places like Ontario or the US Atlantic seaboard.

Even harder for many of us to notice is that less winter precipitation is falling as snow. That has astonishing significance. It’s a factor in low water levels later in the year in the major rivers of western North America and the Great Lakes.

Where are some of the worst hit regions?

In North America, the U.S. southwest is in the crosshairs of reduced rainfall and the rising loss of water to evaporation because of hotter days. But virtually the entire United States is growing progressively drier as changing weather patterns drive rainfall further north.

Canada, in contrast, is getting wetter, but most of that extra precipitation is falling in the far northwest. Southern Canada, where most Canadians live, is in some places getting drier and everywhere experiencing an increasing severity of both extreme droughts and extreme floods. Southern Alberta got both in the first half of this decade. It is particularly vulnerable, and already running out of water in some river basins. Southern Ontario faces increasingly competitive demands for a water supply that is not growing and in summer is declining. The Great Lakes region as a whole is going to have to adjust to lower lake water levels, particularly late in the year. British Columbia, where I live, is getting walloped at both ends of the deal: wilder, wetter winters and much drier summers in places like the Okanagan Valley where water supplies are already often short.

Internationally, Australia is a special case. It’s the driest continent already and in the last three years its people have awakened to that fact that for them climate change is creating a nationwide water crisis now. The Mediterranean countries, central Asia, the Sahel region south of the Sahara, northern Mexico and the Amazon Basin are all places that are likely to lose water in the global weather realignment.

Read Part Two of our Q & A with Chris Wood tomorrow!