Abstract
Groundwater availability, utilization, sustainability, and climate change implications were assessed at regional and provincial scales of Canada. It remains an unexplored resource, estimated to be renewing between 380 and 625 km3/year. However, the provinces have initiated developing their quantitative and qualitative databases for their accurate inventory. Sustainable groundwater availability at the national scale was estimated as 19,832 m3/person/year (750 km3/year), with high regional variations ranging from 3949 in the densely populated Prince Edward Island (PEI) province to 87,899 in the thinly populated Newfoundland and Labrador (NFL). It fulfills 82%, 43%, and 14% of water requirements of the rural population, irrigation, and industry, respectively. It is the potable water source for more than 9 million people countrywide (24% of the population), and provinces of Quebec, and Ontario (1.3 million people), and PEI (0.15 million people) particularly depend on it. It is mostly a free or nominally charged commodity, but its utilization was found to be well under sustainable limits (40% of recharge) at the provincial scales, i.e., under 4% for all the provinces except New Brunswick (NB), which also had just 8% extraction of sustainable availability. Nevertheless, localized issues of quantitative depletion and qualitative degradation were found at scattered places, particularly in Ontario and Quebec. Climate change impacts of warming and changing precipitations on groundwater underscored its stability with some temporal shifts in recharge patterns. In general, increased recharge in late winters and springs was observed due to reduced frost and more infiltration, and was somewhat decreasing in summers due to more intense rainfall events.
Highlights
Canada has one of the world’s largest renewable water resource availability estimated at 3478 km3 /year during 1971–2013, i.e., almost 7% of the global renewable water [1]
This paper explores the regional and provincial distribution of groundwater, its withdrawal, and sustainability aspects under the changing climate
The results show small variations in the water table and groundwater flow directions; the high-recharge scenario projected a rise of 0.05 m, and low recharge projected a decline of 0.025 m in the water table elevations
Summary
Canada has one of the world’s largest renewable water resource availability estimated at 3478 km3 /year during 1971–2013, i.e., almost 7% of the global renewable water [1]. With a sparse population of just 38 million people (Figure 1) in 2021 [2], Canada has freshwater availability of 91,526 m3 /person/year, one of the highest in the world. Canada can be divided into four regions excluding territories, namely, West Coast Columbia), Prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), Central Canada (Ontario and Quebec), and Atlantic Canada Prince Edward Island), as depicted in Figure 1a [3]. 13, 9778 x FOR PEER REVIEW 22 of of 17 (a) (b)
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