Search

This document is a comment on a previous article discussing the regulatory design of the Water Sustainability Act (WSA) in British Columbia, Canada. The comment argues that the WSA's regulatory design took a science-forward approach and considered specific regional factors. It addresses criticisms of the WSA and emphasizes the importance of licensing groundwater use for assessing environmental impacts. The WSA allows for nuanced water management through regulation-making authorities, but challenges remain in implementing the regulations, including Indigenous water rights and government resources. Recommendations for improving the WSA's design include defining sustainability goals, regionalizing regulatory action, and long-term planning. Ongoing resourcing and consideration of Indigenous rights are necessary for the effective implementation of the WSA. [Extracted from the article]

Agricultural activities can generate contaminants that enter underlying granular aquifers and become transported within the groundwater to adjacent streams. This paper reports on estimation of the transit time of groundwater through a saturated granular unconfined aquifer in an agricultural region of Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean, Quebec (Canada). A multi-technique approach is applied, integrating analytical, hydrogeochemical, and numerical methods—to determine groundwater flow from a recharge (wetland) to discharge zone (groundwater seep). Fieldwork observations, including borehole drilling, soil/groundwater sampling, and piezometers, were combined with laboratory measurements of soil hydrogeological properties and stable (δ18OH2O and δ2HH2O)/radioactive (3H) isotopes in the collected groundwater. The Dupuit–Forchheimer-based analytical method used here estimated a groundwater transit time of 7.75 years, whereas the hydrogeochemical-based and three-dimensional FEFLOW numerical method produced estimates of 7.34 and 7.27 years, respectively. The similarity of the three estimates highlights the robustness of the approach, which integrates field data to produce accurate assessments of groundwater transit time. This multi-technique approach will help in the sustainable management of groundwater resources and for preparing effective environmental plans for agricultural practices in areas underlain by aquifers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groundwater sustainability is challenged by the difference between legal and scientific understanding of groundwater, as well as the lack of focused attention to regulatory design in the literature on groundwater institutions, governance and management. The purpose of this paper is to use the scientific characteristics of groundwater to direct the necessary elements of regulatory design for this unique element. Developing interdisciplinary language that could be applied in any jurisdiction or region, the article describes seven groundwater characteristics as processes, functions, qualities, physical sustainability, scale, information and data, and physical state. Using these characteristics of groundwater embeds the scientific understanding of groundwater into regulatory design and enables the expression of new values such as Indigenous rights to water. Applying these scientific characteristics to a case study of new groundwater regulation in a subnational jurisdiction in the Global North—British Columbia (BC), Canada—highlights the failure of regulatory design even in a well-resourced jurisdiction where environmental regulation is the norm. Groundwater in BC is extremely heterogeneous in process and function, with low observation density and undefined sustainability goals where regulations are applied uniformly. Looking forward, three recommendations can be drawn using the scientific characteristics of groundwater to improve regulatory design in BC: defining sustainability goals and ecological thresholds; regionalizing and prioritizing; and long-term planning. This science-forward and interdisciplinary approach has implications for states with customary water entitlements and multiple legal orders. It also provides practitioners with an interdisciplinary language that can be useful for assessing current and future regulatory design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cold-region watershed located in the discontinuous permafrost zone near Umiujaq (Nunavik, Canada) was studied in order to increase understanding of the subarctic water cycle and permafrost dynamics. This essay gives an overview of the research, summarised in a collection of six papers that: respectively characterize the physical three-dimensional cryo-hydrogeological system, present a detailed water balance of the watershed, characterize groundwater and surface-water hydrogeochemistry, describe the application of a tracer method to determine groundwater fluxes, develop a two-dimensional numerical model identifying impacts of groundwater flow on permafrost dynamics, and present a parameter sensitivity analysis. The work serves as a guide for developing site characterization plans at similar permafrost-impacted sites and for evaluating their groundwater resource potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]