Tomorrow is World Water Day!
Note: There were a lot of Tweeps at the meeting. Be sure to visit #CWR2013 to see them all and get a more balanced perspective than what I can provide. Many of the presentations will be on the CWN WWW site; all plenary session presentations were video-recorded and will be available.
20 March 2013 began with the Dutch ambassador to Canada, Wim Geerts, saying a
few words about water and water cooperation, topics about which the Dutch know much.
Good way to begin a plenary panel session on Critical Water Connections: The Nexus - Trade and Supply Chains' chaired by the inimitable Margaret Catley-Carlson, a Canadian with a substantial reputation within and without Canada. She is an impressive person and a straight shooter. She had three corporate folks on her panel.
Plenary Session
Helmi Ansari, Director, Sustainability and Organizational Capability, PepsiCo Foods, Canada has a strong reputation as one who has made great strides in making PepsiCo Canada 'greener'. He spoke of his unit's new mantra, 'Leave no trace' and spoke of his efforts in that arena: water use down 46%; all-electric vehicle fleet with over 1,000,000 miles; zero landfill waste (up to 99% is now diverted); waste heat is used; etc.
Ansari spoke of his efforts to reduce water use and also sewage waste and some surprises he encountered when he was successful at both: the water and sewage use bills increased. The water bill went up because the utility raised rates to counter the lower revenue from conservation; the sewer rates increased because of the more concentrated waste. Ansari mentioned that PepsiCo is still committee to conservation and will not go back to higher water use and lower rates. Seems like a few phone calls or emails could have reduced the surprise element, but as one person told me, if Ansari had known that in advance he might have abandoned his conservation efforts. Ignorance is bliss, eh?
Don Lowry is CEO of EPCOR, a firm wholly owned by the City of Edmonton. EPCOR operates 53 water and wastewater facilities in Alberta, British Columbia, Arizona, and New Mexico.
He spoke of the problem of water supply in Alberta: most of the people live south of Edmonton but 85% of the province's surface water is north of Edmonton. He noted that is also true of Canada in general: the population is mainly in the south, most of the water is in the north (except for the Great Lakes, which are essentially off limits for those living outside the basin).
Lowry noted that EPCOR's facilities are well run, and that wastewater facilities are generating energy. He spoke of price, cost, and value of water. He noted that the 'oilsands' most progress has been in water - lots of low-hanging fruit in water.'
He also left us with a some niftty sound bites: "Water is not an entitlement; it's a hard-earned right," and "The courage to lead is a very rare commodity." Ain't that last one the truth!
Brian Doucette is Director of Environmental Excellence at Suncor Energy. He spoke of the corporation's environmental excellence plan.
Afternoon - Concurrent Sessions
Uldis Silins of the University of Alberta spoke on climate change and its implications for wildfires and forest water supplies. Here is a link to a brief video he used to set the stage for his talk. Not a pretty sight!
Ernie Hui of Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development spoke of the new monitoring program. Here is a video from a presentation he made last June.
Annie Daigle of the Natural Gas Group, Government of New Brunswick, spoke on
the province's efforts to plot a course vis-a-vis shale gas development. The group is doing this very deliberately, examining cases from the USA and elsewhere. A number of reports have been reproduced, including Case Studies and Lessons Learned. I just got the feeling that NB wants to 'do the right thing' and are not in a rush.
Take a look at the group's WWW site. It is impressive, considering that New Brunswick is not a particularly wealthy or large province.
Banquet Speaker
We were treated to Dr. Erwann Michele-Kerjan, an expert on risk management from
the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He gave an excellent presentation, not entirely focused on water, but the relevance to water was evident. He is a very entertaining speaker, calm, not real animated, but uses humor in a very good way. It's best to say 'entertaining but very informative'.
He specializes in the financial impacts and public policy implications of catastrophes, which he did not quite define, but examples will illustrate them: South Asia earthquake and tidal wave, Haitian earthquake, 9/11, etc. He was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. In short: this guy's a heavyweight who travels in circles way above my pay grade.
His humor came through early. He asked those of us who had read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, The Black Swan, to raise our hands. When a bunch of us raised our hands, he then said, 'I mean the entire book." All hands went down save for mine and one other. Michel-Kerjan then commented that you just needed to read the first 50 pages to get the gist of it. He,s pretty much right. He then said he would tell Nassim about the two who had read his book cover-to-cover. Maybe he'll ask Taleb for a refund for the two of us.
He spoke of a new risk architecture, a case study (insurance industry), and going from risk management to value creation. I was amazed at the size of the insurance industry - far larger than the hydrocarbon industry. He also emphasized the interdependence of events and provided some useful advise on ow to get your catastrophe - such as the global water crisis - on someone's (CEO, minister, et al.) agenda when you have to compete with a zillion other similar events in that person's portfolio. Focus on interdependence. For example, a water crisis might generate a food crisis, or an energy crisis, or both, etc. That should get someone's attention.
He noted features of the new risk architecture 1) changes in scale; 2) extreme costs, benefits; 3) growing interdependencies; 4) high speed, short time horizons; 5) uncertainty, information distribution; and 6) modified equilibrium, alternating between public and private.
He also made an interesting comment about people (younger generation) who communicate mainly by texting: you cannot build trust by texting. Interesting.
Michel-Kerjan guided us to the Global Risks 2013 report, which deals with 50 global risks (catastrophes). It's worth perusing, Yeah, water's there.
It was a great end to another wonderful day!
"Don't worry, I won't keep you long." - Nicholas Parker, speaker at Connecting Water Resources 2013, recalling what Elizabeth Taylor said to one of her husbands
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