Community capacity to conduct drought contingency planning: The case of Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the abundance of freshwater resources in Ontario, drought-induced water shortages continue to occur. In response to the drought-like conditions experienced in Ontario in 1998 and 1999, the Province of Ontario created a set of guidelines to manage drought conditions. 'Ontario Low Water Response' (2001) is designed to ensure provincial drought preparedness and to support and aid in the co-ordination of a local (watershed) response to drought. Under these guidelines, the province provides overall direction and co-ordinates policies, science and information systems, and emergency support. The local role is directed toward collecting information, interpreting policy, developing programs and responding to emergencies through the creation and implementation of water response teams. The Ontario drought guidelines are problematic in that they assume that watershed-based communities have the capacity to conduct drought contingency planning. This thesis investigated community capacity to carry out drought contingency planning in two rural Ontario watersheds. The Big Creek watershed is dominated by agriculture, while the upper Credit River watershed faces great pressure from urban development. Both watersheds are dependent upon groundwater and have experienced reduced water supply during recent drought-like conditions. Based on an investigation into the roles, responsibilities and communication patterns between and among agencies and organizations in each watershed, it was concluded that watershed communities have the capacity to create and implement a drought contingency plan. However, they require considerable assistance from the provincial government, especially in terms of regulating water withdrawals. In addition, this thesis identified four barriers to locally-led drought contingency planning including drought definition, policy coordination, communication, and community empowerment. Examples of local level drought contingency planning in Australia and the United States were used to indicate strengths and weaknesses in the Ontario drought guidelines. It was determined that the Ontario guidelines promote a collaborative approach. However, they are based on too many assumptions. To be successful at proactive planning, and to ensure an effective and timely response to drought conditions, community capacity to conduct drought contingency planning must be evaluated first. This thesis proposed an evaluative framework, which can be used to evaluate a community's capacity to carry out drought contingency planning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".