Manitoba Sustainable Development is asking for public input on a draft regulation governing water drainage.
Jody Tucker, from the Turtle River Watershed Conservation District, warns wetlands are in trouble if there are no changes to the regulations.
Last June the provincial government passed the Sustainable Watersheds Act, establishing no net loss of wetland benefits and requiring compensation to restore the benefits lost through drainage activities.
According to Tucker, permanent wetlands were basically untouchable. Now that’s no longer the case. Landowners now have a few options like paying, purchasing, or protecting.
“The protect component would allow someone who already owns land that contains an existing wetland or wetlands, to permanently protect the existing wetland with a conservation agreement. And that would be at a ratio of 3:1. So you can protect three acres of existing wetland which would allow you to drain one acre of existing wetlands.” He continues, “So one acre plus three acres equals four acres of existing wetlands before protection. So you protect the three acres and drain the one. So 4-1=3, which means you are still out an acre of wetland that was there before. “
Across Manitoba, 70 percent of wetland habitats have been drained, damaged or destroyed because of agricultural and urban development. The province is losing wetlands at a rate of 5400 acres a year in southwestern Manitoba a year.
Another concern for Tucker is of compensation. “You can pay. In the plain language proposed regulations right now it’s not really entirely clear where the money will go to other than what they call an approved organization.”
The ratio is 2:1 with compensation costs of $6,000 per acre.
The Lake Winnipeg Foundation says there is to monitoring, auditing or evaluation processes included in the regulation to measure its ecological impacts.
“It took ten thousand years to get most of our wetlands to the state they’re in. In the proposed regulations one of the components allows the creation of new wetlands. It sounds good, but, newly created wetlands are actually a net contributor to greenhouse gasses for 80 to 100 years whereas a newly drained wetland is no longer a carbon sink; it becomes a carbon emitter.”
“I understand the need for good farmland. But at the same time, we need a healthy environment to live, and wetlands play a critical role in that. We talk about climate change resiliency and flood mitigation, biodiversity, to name a few. But what they’re proposing is pretty much just the opposite,” Tucker said.
The deadline to voice your concerns is this Saturday. You can email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. You can also go to the government's website at https://www.gov.mb.ca/sd/consultations/index.html.
Lake Winnipeg Foundation created a template you can copy and paste into an email. Yhe link to their site is found here.
