Moving Waters: Water Management Options to Achieve Social, Economic, and Environmental Goals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The goal of Alberta's Water for Life program is to manage our rivers in a way that maintains healthy aquatic ecosystems, safe and secure drinking water, and sufficient water for sustainable economic development.Alberta's success in achieving these goals will depend on our ability to preserve and protect healthy rivers, lakes, and connected groundwaters.Water Matters has embarked on a project to explore whether current laws and policy are sufficient to protect healthy river ecosystems and meet the needs of water users, and how best to achieve our Water for Life goals.The concept of instream flows (IFNs) has become the focus in river management around the world, because it integrates the quantity, timing and quality of water flows required to maintain healthy and resilient aquatic ecosystems and the human livelihoods and well-being that depend upon them. 1 Unfortunately, Alberta's laws and policies do not prioritize the use of IFNs or scientific criteria as the foundation for water and watershed management decisions.Therefore, they are insufficient to ensure sustainable surface water and groundwater use, or to protect or maintain healthy rivers systems.In Sharing Our Rivers: How Albertans Can Maintain Healthy Rivers, Communities and Economies 2 , we highlighted that safeguarding healthy rivers is a shared responsibility of all Albertans, and that water management decisions need to be based on science-or evidence-based criteria to keep rivers healthy.To this end, we recommended adoption of policy and operational changes that protect or enhance river health by ensuring IFNs -the amount of water necessary to protect all of the benefits provided to us by healthy rivers -are maintained and protected.In our second brief on this topic, Allocating our Water: Changing to Meet the Public Interest, we advocated for changes to Alberta's water management system and laws governing allocation of water rights, to improve the likelihood of achieving all of the goals of the Water for Life policy. 3 In Alberta, access to water is prioritized by the date of application for a water licence.During times of drought, this results in preferential access to water for the holders of senior (older) licences, over the holders of junior (younger) licences. 4 This system of "prior allocation" of water rights is generally referred to as "First In Time, First In Right" (FIT-FIR).The primary short-coming of FIT-FIR is that it creates winners and losers by imposing restrictions or controls on water access and use, based on the age of water licences held: holders of senior licences ("senior licencees") become winners and those with more junior licences ("junior licencees") who are subject to restricted access to water become losers.Here, we describe possible ways of achieving a more equitable distribution of water rights that responds to the full suite of social, environmental, and economic challenges that were less evident when Alberta's water management system was first put in place.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".