Harvest Water From Fog

Canada’s fresh-water supply has been drained by drought and dwindling aquifers. To find more, just look up.

- Tatiana Estevez

AFTER I GRADUATED from the University of Ottawa with my B.A. in business administration in 2015, I went on a backpacking trip around California. It turned out that my holiday coincided with the worst drought in the state’s history. Signs of the crisis were everywhere—lawns browned and burned, lakebeds dried up into cracked mudflats. The governor’s office lowered water usage limits by 25 per cent to protect the state’s supply, infuriating wealthy home-owners and golfers. I saw news reports about financially overleveraged farmers dying by suicide as their crops withered. And yet, when I got to San Francisco, I couldn’t see across the bay for all the fog. That was my eureka moment: the sky was full of water. Why couldn’t we use it to fight what was happening on the ground?

Signs of Canada’s own draining water supply are all around us: worsening wildfires, prairie-wide droughts, stranded salmon and surging insurance premiums for farmers. Yet, to most Canadians, the liquid coming from our kitchen taps feels like an unlimited resource. Nearly nine million of us rely exclusively on the fresh water stored in underground aquifers, including everyone in P.E.I. The problem is that, globally, we’re now drawing water out of our aquifers much faster than they can be naturally replenished by rainfall. At the same time, we’re ignoring the abundant water hovering above us. Canada’s West Coast has the same fog that caught my attention in San Francisco; out east, clouds bursting with desalinated water roll in off the Atlantic. Man-made desalination plants are energy-intensive and expensive, so it’s cheaper and safer to let the clouds do the desalinating for us. It’s just a matter of getting that water to ground level.