Trevor Herriot is a Regina-based naturalist and the author of eight books including The Economy of Sparrows, released in September 2023.

If you live in Western Canada, you’ve seen it in your news feed: El Niño and climate change tag teaming to produce scant snowfall and warmer temperatures this winter; meteorologists and others predicting more forest fires, worsening drought and water shortages to come. 

In January, Alberta announced in an online town hall meeting on drought readiness that it was preparing for a state of emergency. Fifty-one basins north to south were already experiencing a water shortage. People in the town of Cowley, Alta., and other nearby communities have been hauling drinking water since last July. Their water comes from the Oldman reservoir, but prolonged drought has left the intake pipes high and dry. 

A few weeks ago, John Pomeroy, Canada Research Chair in Water Resources and Climate Change, was on The Big Story podcast, talking about drought.

The extent of last year’s drought “puts us in a precarious situation,” he said, “with very low soil moisture levels, reservoirs that have been depleted already and in some cases are five metres below normal levels.” 

The low snowpack in the Rockies, which he called “the water towers that supply the rivers that flow into B.C., the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba,” will put this vast area of Canada into “great peril in 2024 for extreme hydrological drought — something unprecedented in modern times.”

East of the mountains, however, there is another, lesser known hydrological system that has been keeping part of the northern Great Plains hydrated, and helping it survive cycles of drought since the last ice sheets drew back and left a glaciated Serengeti of Pleistocene megafauna. 

Across the prairies, glacial retreat left dimples in the ground that became small wetlands, like this one in Biggar, Sask. Photo: Branimir Gjetvaj

As chunks of ice calved off the front of the retreating glacier, they became buried in till and then melted away to form millions of pothole depressions that still dimple the plains from Iowa to the Peace Lowlands of northwestern Alberta — encompassing more than 770,000 square kilometres in one of the planet’s most diverse and unique wetland-grassland ecosystems. 

This “prairie pothole region,” however, is also part of one of the most altered landscapes on Earth, having been converted to vast industrial farms growing corn, cereal, oil, hay and pulse crops. 

It’s estimated that as much as 70 per cent of wetlands have been lost in settled areas of the Prairies. In certain regions of the prairies the number is in excess of 90 per cent. Last summer, the farmers trying to make a living on such a de-watered landscape watched their crops wither in drought. A record $2.4 billion in crop insurance payouts from the province ensued, which Saskatchewan’s finance minister used to explain a higher than forecasted deficit.

Just as outdated forestry practices intensified last summer’s forest fires, this is another place where the history of land management in Western Canada is bringing a new normal that will require new thinking.

“It makes me a little uncomfortable, but it’s been said before,” one of those thinkers, Pascal Badiou, says from his home in Winnipeg.

Badiou reluctantly admits he might be Canada’s leading expert on the climate solution values of wetlands. Over the phone, he sounds a bit like your favourite high school science teacher: someone who knows how to balance the limitations of his audience with the need to communicate the complexities of the thing that gets him out of bed each morning.  

During the 45-minute conversation, those complexities reveal themselves one at a time, informed by his passion for the prairie pothole region as a unique landscape. There may be one or two other regions on the planet that have small wetlands like this, he says, but not over such a vast region.

Scientist Pascal Badiou is a leading expert on the climate solution value of wetlands. Across the Canadian Prairies, that value has been overlooked and many of the wetlands destroyed. Photo: Ducks Unlimited Canada

Born and raised in the francophone St. Boniface neighbourhood of Winnipeg, Badiou had the science chops that might have made him a pharmacist, but early in his studies his girlfriend (now wife) brought him out on a canoe trip in Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. His life studying aquatic ecology starting there. He knew then, he says, that “these are the things I want to study for the rest of my life.”

As a leading research scientist at Ducks Unlimited Canada’s Institute for Wetland and Waterfowl Research, he focuses on how wetlands provide carbon and greenhouse gas services, as well as how wetlands contribute to water quality and quantity.

Research by Badiou and colleagues around the planet has shown that 30 per cent of terrestrial carbon on the planet is stored in wetlands, although they cover only seven per cent of the surface area. While the majority of that is stored in boreal peatlands, prairie potholes like the ones Badiou studies are believed to be taking up more carbon per hectare on an annual basis. 

Everything in the greenhouse emissions arena, however, has at least two sides. The higher productivity of prairie wetlands means that, when mismanaged, they can emit more carbon as well as methane, Badiou says. 

Studies that the institute has done across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta have shown the median nutrient concentration in wetlands surrounded by cropland is 40 times higher than levels in wetlands surrounded by grassland or woody vegetation. 

“And, what we are seeing is that if you have higher nutrient concentrations in a wetland, you also have higher methane emissions,” Badiou says. That means natural wetlands on the prairies that were once helping to cool the climate both locally and globally can, under intensive agriculture, become greater sources of methane, which is much more potent than carbon as a greenhouse gas.

The institute measures carbon and methane emissions with something Badiou calls “Eddy covariance flux towers.” Mounted with sophisticated sensors for measuring GHG emissions, the instruments provide real-time results showing the amount of carbon entering and leaving the wetland.

Dark patches signalling wetlands in aerial photos from 1956, on the left, and 2019 illustrate how an area of farmland in Saskatchewan has beed dried out over the decades. Photos: Ducks Unlimited Canada

Badiou believes if farmers were given an incentive to restore a buffer of some natural, perennial cover around each wetland, the nutrient load in the wetland might drop enough to allow it to become a sink instead of a source of greenhouse emissions.

Meanwhile, Badiou says, “smaller wetlands do a disproportionately better job of processing nutrients. It’s the same reason that small wetlands are more productive for all forms of aquatic life, including waterfowl. “Your perimeter to surface area ratio is much greater. The perimeter is where all the biological action is happening — nutrient processing, productivity and habitat.”

Unfortunately, farmers have been allowed to drain these smaller, more productive and ecologically valuable wetlands — classified by government water agencies as class one, two and three wetlands — often by consolidating them into larger permanent ponds.

That, Badiou says, is a bad idea. “If you drain all the small wetlands into these larger permanent ponds with little habitat surrounding them, they can become choked with blue-green algae blooms and that results in pretty big pulses of methane emissions.”

“Over the last half century, 488,000 hectares of wetlands have been destroyed in the region, releasing approximately 43 million tonnes of carbon [which is] equivalent to the emissions of approximately 1.5 million cars over 20 years.”

When asked about the local climate effects of de-watering large expanses of the prairie pothole region, Badiou says they are“really just embarking on that line of research and we are trying to generate some of the answers with our flux towers.”

The towers allow them to look at local temperatures, relative humidity, incoming and outgoing long-wave and short-wave radiation and evapotranspiration. 

Though these small wetlands have an outsized ability to store carbon and cool the surrounding environment, they can also become harmful emitters of greenhouse gases when destroyed. Photo: Branimir Gjetvaj

They are finding that wetlands provide a direct climate benefit. “Just like when you stand next to a lake on a hot day to get cool, that’s what this complement of prairie wetlands does. They’re air conditioners. They’re cooling and humidifying the atmosphere.” 

He goes on to talk about the effects of heat stress on crops during prolonged drought, suggesting that these climate cooling effects are another reason to retain wetlands. He says he is “interested in seeing if there are improved crop yields when wetlands are retained, especially in times of drought. . . . Any time you’re able to keep water on the landscape you’re going to contribute to local precipitation as well as cooling.”

With all that in mind, what would he say to the public today, on World Wetlands Day? 

“In the spring, get out and go visit a local wetland when you can. Just sit there for 10 or 15 minutes. If you take the time and just sit there and let yourself be a part of it, you cannot miss the sheer abundance of life. Look into the water column — it is teeming with life. I’m amazed every time I go. If people can generate that connection with nature in a wetland, they’ll realize their value.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Trevor Herriot is a Regina-based writer, naturalist and grassland advocate.

As representatives from around the world were starting to gather in Montreal at COP15 to work toward an agreement to stave off biodiversity collapse, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe decided it was a good time to say a few things about his province’s environmental sustainability and stewardship.

No matter that Saskatchewan was ranked dead last in the environmental report cards handed out to the provinces by the Conference Board of Canada. According to Premier Moe and the new website he launched, “Saskatchewan has some of the highest-quality and sustainably produced food, fuel and fertilizer, that a growing world needs.”

A quick glance at the website, filled with images of hard-working people out on the land, reveals a set of measurements carefully curated to show that “in the areas of sustainable resources, environmental stewardship, community support and clean energy Saskatchewan is rising to the challenge.”  

Some of the site’s figures are crying out for scrutiny, but there is more to be learned by looking at the environmental indicators they chose to leave out.

Here is how Saskatchewan measures up if you apply international standards and independent academic research to assess the province’s record on sustainability and stewardship.

Sustainability in Agriculture 

The 2022 Environmental Performance Index, put together by Yale and Columbia Universities, ranks 180 nations in eleven categories of environmental performance. In the agriculture category, Canada, with Saskatchewan as its most agricultural province, ranked 64th, well behind countries like Argentina, Croatia, Denmark and the United States. 

Saskatchewan is losing ground cover as more and more land is converted for agriculture, losing wetlands and habitat in the process. Photo: Sara Hylton / The Narwhal

More importantly, the province’s own State of the Environment Report, hardly robust accounting, admits that Saskatchewan is losing natural cover in what they refer to as “the agricultural zone” — i.e. south of the boreal forest. Under the “agricultural land cover” section, the report says in recent years farmers have increased their cropped acreage, not only by adopting zero tillage practices but also “at the expense of wetlands, woodlands and permanent cover such as tame hay, pasture and native rangelands.” 

Endangered species protection 

Andrea Olive, a recognized expert in environmental policy at the University of Toronto, argues Saskatchewan has the weakest laws for endangered species and habitat protection in the country.

Protected and Conserved Areas

Much of the world considers the percentage of natural areas protected and conserved to be a vital indicator of environmental stewardship and health. Nations at COP15 are moving toward a target of protecting 30 per cent of terrestrial land cover for nature.

How is Saskatchewan doing? It is still working toward the old international target of 12 per cent, set in 1987. The latest figures from the province’s State of the Environment Report indicate Saskatchewan is stuck at 9.76 per cent, with roughly 6.3 million hectares protected. It is worth noting, however, that almost 2.4 million of those hectares are provincial lands leased out for private agricultural interests.

Peter Durocher, manager of the Sakitawak project, hopes the area where he lives in Saskatchewan, including Lac Île-à-la-Crosse where he fishes, will become an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area. The province is falling behind when it comes to protecting land. Photo: Jeremy Williams / River Voices

Wetlands

Some of the most recent data on the state of wetlands in Saskatchewan comes from a 2011 report by the Prairie Habitat Joint Venture. Monitoring wetlands in the three Prairie provinces over a ten-year period, their report showed the rate of “absolute gross total wetland loss” was greatest in Saskatchewan. More than 56 per cent of the area of wetland monitored was drained away by farmers during that decade. 

Alberta and Manitoba have wetland policies to ensure that there will be no net loss of grassland, but in Saskatchewan there is no wetland policy. The Water Security Agency continues to license illegal and new drainage without any requirements for retention or restoration. 

Peter Leavitt, a Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change and Society, says Saskatchewan has lost more than half of its wetlands in the last century. As well, he and his colleagues have released studies showing nearly half of the permanent surface waters in southern Saskatchewan have levels of algal toxins above World Health Organization thresholds.

Fossil analyses conducted by Leavitt and others make it clear these damages are greatest in areas with intense agriculture. They have resulted in toxic algal blooms at levels far above any prior to the advent of farming.

Grassland

The same Prairie Habitat Joint Venture study showed that over that decade the study area lost 3.6 per cent of its native grassland. The Nature Conservancy of Canada estimates Saskatchewan has lost more than two million acres of native grassland over the past 25 years.

Native grasslands across Saskatchewan are being dug up for agriculture as farmers try to use as much of their land as possible, resulting in the loss of more than two million acres in the past 25 years. Photo: Supplied by Trevor Herriot

Climate change action

Saskatchewan’s emissions per capita are the highest in Canada at 55.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, which is 216 per cent above the national average of 17.7 tonnes per capita. And those figures do not include the enormous volumes of carbon pollution released by the agriculture industry when acres of wetlands and land with natural cover are drained, plowed, bulldozed and burned.

None of these emissions are being accounted for by Saskatchewan’s government and its controversial climate change strategy, “Prairie Resilience,” launched five years ago this month and roundly criticized. 

The strategy, with its subtitle declaring that it was “Made-in-Saskatchewan,” may play well to a portion of the electorate, but when a government makes up its own indicators, ignoring science and international standards, it is practicing self-delusion. Nature has no respect for politics or the boundaries drawn on maps. Biodiversity loss in Saskatchewan or anywhere has national and international consequences. 

As Saskatchewan people, we need to look beyond our borders and listen to the scientists and conservation organizations who monitor and measure environmental damage using widely-accepted indicators and methods. 

Who knows? We may even find that some of the innovative systems, policies and practices that are working elsewhere to protect biodiversity and reduce carbon pollution will work here as well.

If we don’t, Saskatchewan exceptionalism will prove to be as damaging a form of hot air as the other gases we release at world-leading levels.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Trevor Herriot is a writer and grassland advocate living in Regina. Cathy Holtslander is a Saskatoon-based researcher and environmental advocate.

The year that has just passed brought the reality of climate change into the lives of Canadians in devastating ways. 

Here in Saskatchewan, the severe drought and heat dome of midsummer saw the South Saskatchewan River, the lifeblood of the prairie, drop perilously low. As high temperatures and desiccating winds cut crop production in the south by half, Néhiyaw, Metis and Dene people in the north were forced out of their homes, fleeing fires that burned more than 800,000 hectares of forest and peatlands. 

Indigenous people, who suffer disproportionately on the front lines of climate inaction, have long warned us that colonial ways will make the earth uninhabitable. 

As 2022 begins, let’s take stock and ask ourselves: how well are we responding to the calls for climate action and justice from Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, scientists and the youth in our communities? 

While some jurisdictions committed to reducing dependence on fossil fuels, the Saskatchewan government went the other way, pledging to increase oil production by 25 per cent to 600,000 barrels per day by 2030. Saskatchewan already has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world. Meanwhile, the province’s climate action strategy rests almost exclusively on carbon capture technology — designed to allow for the extraction of more oil — and expensive and unproven small modular reactors that produce dangerous nuclear waste. 

In the face of global consensus that putting a price on carbon is an effective way to reduce emissions, the Saskatchewan government wasted an undisclosed amount of money on its failed Supreme Court challenge to the federal government’s power to implement carbon pricing. Premier Scott Moe also went on record opposing any cap on emissions, characterizing it as “an outright attack on the energy industry in Saskatchewan.”

Managed well, native grasslands are an important carbon sink and can play a role in nature-based climate solutions. These solutions have gained increasing traction recently — receiving attention in the federal budget and at the COP26 climate summit in 2021, but the Saskatchewan government has resisted calls to increase protection of grasslands, opting to sell off Crown lands instead. Photo: Trevor Herriot

At the COP26 gathering this fall, nature-based solutions gained some attention as political leaders heard from scientists that we can fight climate change by working with nature to enhance the resiliency and carbon-storing capacity of natural landscapes. But as other governments embrace international targets to protect 30 per cent of natural landscapes by 2030, in 2021 the Saskatchewan government ignored the pleas of Indigenous leaders and continued to sell off Crown lands, effectively removing their protected status as public lands. And rather than increase protection for our northern forests to meet the target, the provincial government announced plans to double the growth of the forestry sector by 2030, opting for clearcuts and short harvesting cycles that will be unsustainable in the hotter, dryer conditions, more frequent and intense fire seasons and shorter winters climate change will bring. 

Its forestry plan targets old-growth stands that provide habitat for endangered woodland caribou. The government has also given a green light to Paper Excellence, a subsidiary of the Indonesian giant Sinar Mas, to obtain a portion of its wood supply for a re-opened Prince Albert pulp mill from agricultural Crown land and private landowners in the forest fringe area — where there are no obligations to replant, and where deforestation would be the likely result.

Doubling the growth of the forest industry by 2030 would also mean cutting smaller, younger trees over wider areas, making larger cutblocks and leaving less biomass behind to decompose and form new soil. Regrowth and plantations would struggle to survive on eroded land in baking heat. At a time when climate change demands more careful stewardship to protect and enhance natural forests, Saskatchewan’s leadership is setting a course for degradation and deforestation. 

Saskatchewan peat moss mining project faces opposition from Indigenous communities, conservationists

This was also the year peat bogs began to receive international attention as the most efficient carbon sinks on the planet. According to the United Nations, they cover a mere three per cent of the Earth’s surface, but store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests put together. In Saskatchewan, the Lac La Ronge Indian Band is in a fight to protect more than 2,500 hectares of peat bogs on their traditional lands, threatened by the government’s support for a Quebec company’s proposal to clear the forests and sell the peat.

In southern Saskatchewan, the provincial government continues to stand by as market forces and new agricultural systems drive carbon-releasing land-use practices across millions of hectares in Treaty 4 and Treaty 6 territory.

Facing rising costs and increasing pressures, some farmers turn to the draining of wetlands and the plowing of perennial grasslands to increase farmland. Both practices degrade the ability of the landscape to store carbon. Photo: Trevor Herriot

As farmers face rising land and input costs, and lower yields in drought years, many are draining wetlands, plowing perennial grasslands and bulldozing, burning and burying aspen bluffs and shelterbelts. All of these unregulated practices degrade the capacity of our waterways and landscapes to retain moisture-holding soil carbon and recharge groundwater that buffer the effects of climate change. In the provincial government’s much-criticized climate change strategy, “Prairie Resilience,” the only measure to support “natural systems” south of the boreal forest is business-as-usual zero-tillage cropping that depends on using glyphosate, a controversial herbicide suspected to degrade soil ecology. Despite its name, the strategy does not once mention native prairie and its carbon-storage value, which research has shown to be far superior to other prairie land uses in retaining carbon, biodiversity and soil health. 

Indigenous groups, environmentalists and the Municipalities of Saskatchewan have called on the government to protect our wetlands with regulations comparable to policies in Manitoba and Alberta. While the Saskatchewan Water Security Agency insists it is developing a policy, agricultural drainage that is eliminating sloughs and potholes — and damaging our rivers, lakes and streams — continues unabated.

Meet the people saving Canada’s native grasslands

Last year saw the provincial government using climate change resiliency and food security to justify its $4 billion dream of expanding irrigation out of the South Saskatchewan River. Critics, however, point out that while withdrawing more water for irrigation may improve crops for a small number of farmers, it would place more pressure on a river that this year received very little runoff from the southern Rockies because of high upstream water usage in Alberta. 

The Saskatchewan Environmental Society and the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, among others, are concerned the project would contaminate soil, degrade water quality and destroy habitat for fish and other wildlife supporting Indigenous people in North America’s largest inland delta, the Saskatchewan River Delta, which stores untold volumes of carbon in muskeg and is already being dried out by the management of hydro dams upstream. 

It may no longer be politically acceptable for our leaders to openly deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change, but Saskatchewan’s weak response to the climate emergency amounts to an implicit denial nonetheless. 

The provincial government is clinging to the wrong side of history by failing to meaningfully collaborate with people in Saskatchewan — both Indigenous and non-Indigenous — and take corrective action. Its allegiance to colonial relationships and an extractive economy is taking us to the brink, saddling our youth and future generations with an unjust burden.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.