Drinking water security (DWS) is essential for meeting sustainable development goals because of its indisputable connection to human health and its direct impacts on poverty alleviation, economic development, environmental sustainability, gender equality, conflict prevention, and disaster preparedness. While DWS is a critical priority, it is also an allusive one. This is in part because tools for identifying, assessing, and mitigating threats to source water quantity, quality, and—treatability in particular—are often misunderstood. Globally, a “Multiple Barrier Approach” is used for public health protection through the provision of safe drinking water. It includes source water protection (SWP) and treatment as key barriers for public health protection. Climate change-exacerbated disturbances such as fires and floods are increasingly highlighting inadequacies in these barriers, particularly SWP. Although forest management-based approaches (including harvesting) are increasingly advocated for SWP, guidance for how to deploy them without compromising treatability is lacking and confounded by recently revealed, alarming inadequacies in regulatory approaches for managing public health risks for drinking water systems reliant on high quality supplies such as those originating in many parts of the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains, and Great Lakes regions. Using a case-study approach from investigations conducted across these regions (including Portland) and insights from the recent international expert workshop on Wildfire Threats to Forested Drinking Water Supplies: Recent Advances & Opportunities in Understanding & Management, water security threats from climate shocks and approaches for enhancing resilience will be discussed.
Monica Emelko is a Professor and the Canada Research Chair in Water Science, Technology & Policy at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She is a Professional Engineer and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. Her research on water treatment and health risk analysis has informed water regulations globally, including the suite of U.S. Surface Water Treatment Rules and their international equivalents. Emelko also works with the Canadian Space Agency in evaluating innovative technologies for use on the Moon to purify lunar water. Her team’s most recent work has revealed alarming inadequacies in regulatory approaches for managing public health risks for drinking water systems reliant on high quality supplies such as those originating in many parts of the Pacific Northwest, the Rocky Mountains, and Great Lakes regions. Emelko has also worked on studying wildfire and its implications to drinking water treatment since 2004. Her team was amongst the first cited by the IPCC in describing wildfire effects on water treatability and received the Canadian Council of the Federation Award of Excellence in Water Stewardship. They also assisted as first responders assisting with re-entry risk management during and after the 2016 Horse River wildfire in Fort McMurray, Alberta—one of the costliest disasters in Canadian history—and received a citation from the Premier for service to the province. Monica is the Scientific Director of forWater, a pan-Canadian and internationally partnered research network of academics, water utilities, government agencies, industrial forestry companies, and NGOs focused on maximizing benefit from forest management (including industrial operations) and drinking water source protection for enhanced resilience in water treatment, operations, and risk management. In 2024, Emelko’s team and forWater partner’s West Fraser Cochrane and the City of Calgary developed the first explicitly drinking water treatability-focused values within a forest management plan values that have been reported for source water protection purposes.