Moving to Action: NRT National Water Forum Report

MESSAGE FROM THE NRT VICE-CHAIR
AND PRESIDENT AND CEO

This report, on the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy’s (NRT) National Water Forum, provides the start of an action plan that will make important contributions to the management and governance of Canada’s water resources. The NRT’s report, Charting a Course, Sustainable Water Use by Canada’s Natural Resource Sectors, brings together the ecological and economic importance of water — highlighting the need to improve water management and governance to ensure healthy ecosystems and prosperous natural resource sectors. The Forum brought together experts from across Canada in January 2012 to discuss the NRT recommendations in Charting a Course and provide advice on how they could be put into action.

There was clear consensus among the experts and participants at the Forum that now is the time to begin acting on many of our recommendations for better water governance, exploring the use of water pricing and investing in water-use forecasting and data. Participants felt so strongly about the importance of these issues they developed a new recommendation to create a charter affirming the legitimacy of collaborative water governance processes.

The NRT strongly encourages governments, industry, and others to act on these recommendations. A number of initiatives and activities already underway could embrace some of the NRT priority recommendations and move them forward, such as the Council of Federation’s (CoF) Water Stewardship Council, the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment’s (CCME) water action plan, the Canadian Water Resources Association’s (CWRA) work on a Canada-wide water strategy, and provincial and territorial water strategies and policies that are currently under renewal. In the current fiscal situation, it will be impossible for any one government or organization to move all these recommendations forward, but through new collaborations and partnerships, we can make real progress on sustaining Canada’s most valuable resource — our water.